Why We Start Where We Start
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Bits, Bytes, and Boolean Logic: The Unchanged Foundations Of Computer Language for the Last 50 Years
Of all the titles I hold as I go through life, one of my absolute favorites is "daddy". Watching my children blossom as they go through the different planes of development is a gift to which few can compare. I think of hearing their heart beat for the first time with a doppler heart monitor, hearing their their first vocalizations as they start to crawl, and hearing them laugh through trying to retell a passage from a book they found funny. The steps they take to learn to express and understand the world are such a joy to walk through with them.
As a software engineer who also dabbles in hardware engineering and robotics, the world of the inner workings of computers is where I spend my professional energies. I want to share it with my kids, because I want them to be able to see deeper than I do. The vision I have has been earned through entirely too many hours deciphering and thinking through the conversion of electrical signals into information. The closest analogy that I can think of is learning Spanish in High School. I am sufficiently proficient that I can exist in a Spanish speaking country and interact with non-English speaking locals for a short period of time before exhaustion sets in and I need to let my brain rest. To the locals, it is obvious that I am not a local. It is only because they're intelligent human beings that any communication actually happens.
Computers are a similar foreign land with a foreign language. Having lived in it for two thirds of my life, I am as close to a native speaker as exists. I'm keenly aware of how much linguistic growth has taken place in the quarter century that I have been involved with their inner workings. In short, when it comes to computers I'm like my daughter who relates funny passages from her books because the action of reading and understanding the emotions from the characters in her books is second nature.
When deciding where to start, I looked to my children's first forays into spoken language. There they repeat vocalizations that are as foreign to genuine wit as the bad dad jokes I love to tell my kids. Said vocalizations serve a profoundly important function. They practice the harmonized use of vocal cords, lungs and resonance chambers. These mechanics are fundamental to all spoken languages. I reflected on what was fundamental to writing software, and that is what is found in the first module of Montessori Computers. Bits, Bytes and Boolean Logic have been fundamental to computer science since the 1970s, where the Motorola 6800 series and the iconic MOS 6502 processors took shape. Even with all the advances since then, these concepts are still the same fundamental concepts at work today.
Presenting these concepts mechanically in a way that children can manipulate with their hands lets them build whatever abstractions in their mind make sense to them. These materials are an adequate metaphor for the microscopic electrical machinations that happen inside of computers. Just like most people don't often consider the shape of their smile when they say the word "cheese" for a picture, software engineers don't often ponder bits while they're writing software. The bits are there, baked into the larger poetic expression of bending the operations of a computer to solve whatever bigger problem they are tasked with addressing.
As a software engineer who also dabbles in hardware engineering and robotics, the world of the inner workings of computers is where I spend my professional energies. I want to share it with my kids, because I want them to be able to see deeper than I do. The vision I have has been earned through entirely too many hours deciphering and thinking through the conversion of electrical signals into information. The closest analogy that I can think of is learning Spanish in High School. I am sufficiently proficient that I can exist in a Spanish speaking country and interact with non-English speaking locals for a short period of time before exhaustion sets in and I need to let my brain rest. To the locals, it is obvious that I am not a local. It is only because they're intelligent human beings that any communication actually happens.
Computers are a similar foreign land with a foreign language. Having lived in it for two thirds of my life, I am as close to a native speaker as exists. I'm keenly aware of how much linguistic growth has taken place in the quarter century that I have been involved with their inner workings. In short, when it comes to computers I'm like my daughter who relates funny passages from her books because the action of reading and understanding the emotions from the characters in her books is second nature.
When deciding where to start, I looked to my children's first forays into spoken language. There they repeat vocalizations that are as foreign to genuine wit as the bad dad jokes I love to tell my kids. Said vocalizations serve a profoundly important function. They practice the harmonized use of vocal cords, lungs and resonance chambers. These mechanics are fundamental to all spoken languages. I reflected on what was fundamental to writing software, and that is what is found in the first module of Montessori Computers. Bits, Bytes and Boolean Logic have been fundamental to computer science since the 1970s, where the Motorola 6800 series and the iconic MOS 6502 processors took shape. Even with all the advances since then, these concepts are still the same fundamental concepts at work today.
Presenting these concepts mechanically in a way that children can manipulate with their hands lets them build whatever abstractions in their mind make sense to them. These materials are an adequate metaphor for the microscopic electrical machinations that happen inside of computers. Just like most people don't often consider the shape of their smile when they say the word "cheese" for a picture, software engineers don't often ponder bits while they're writing software. The bits are there, baked into the larger poetic expression of bending the operations of a computer to solve whatever bigger problem they are tasked with addressing.