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Comment I learned to program (Score 3, Interesting) 228

on one of these that my uncle gave me. Pretty much changed my life.

What this article really failed to mention was the software side. You could program anything on the computer in BASIC and the LCD screen made it easy to create and position graphics (no need to worry about resolution - each pixel is always in exactly the same place and precisely the same number characters will always fit on the screen.) Made for years of writing games and applications on that thing. This is really something the "laptops for kids" people should be thinking about.
The Internet

Submission + - Email in the 18th century 2

morphovar writes: More than 200 years ago it was already possible to send messages throughout Europe and America at the speed of an aeroplane — wireless and without need for electricity. The optical telegraph network consisted of a chain of towers, each placed 5 to 20 kilometres apart from each other. Every tower had a telegrapher, looking through a telescope at the previous tower in the chain. If the semaphore on that tower was put into a certain position, the telegrapher copied that symbol on his own tower. A message could be transmitted from Amsterdam to Venice in one hour's time. A few years before, a messenger on a horse would have needed at least a month's time to do the same.

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