All those HR Giger artworks, yes, Omni had style

Having observed a fair amount of computer based primary school, it seems to me anyway that the biggest problem is that kids just can't focus properly that way. Even if the machine is locked down to prevent open internet access, it's just too easy for them to become distracted by the medium itself. Books, pencils and paper may not be flashy, but isn't that actually desirable, in this context?

Yup. As a kid I could "entertain" (distract is the better word) myself by "drawing shapes" with the cursor, highlighting random things, switching between random cells in Excel, or just like... browsing through the system without any plan or reason. Procrastination is hell of a drug.

I'm so lucky I didn't have this in the classroom.

To be fair, I did entertain myself by drawing comics on my notebook or playing with my pencil and rubber as if they were toy cars.

I drew a lot of doodles and did things like that as well, but I think that they're less visually stimulating and simply "slower" so there's still some brain capacity left for learning.

Congratulations, you were exercising your literacy and art skills.

People are saying, oh i used to doodle, blah blah. But doodling in the margins is very HELPFUL for the rest of your brain to focus and memorize what is happening in the lecture.

Sounds interesting! Any good sources on that subject? I find results pointing both against it and for it, but am not a psychologist.

Even doodling on the margin can be distracting. Or doing little tricks with the pencil. But these don't distract the verbal part of the brain as much perhaps.

I was on the tail end of no-screen schools, and even then I could find anything to distract myself with, daydreaming if necessary. But mostly doodling the gutters.

If you open any of my middle school notebooks you'll find around 5-10x more doodles than notes, by surface area.

It could be that the inability to doodle is actually cramping current students - it might be important to management of boredom?

Digital doodling should be possible; I know I've used the zoom annotation feature to doodle during meetings.

It's arguably LESS distracting, since you can lock down the available actions on a Chromebook, for example, while I was doodling away in my notebooks as a 90's kid. I don't think you can really make sweeping statements about which is better overall.

Watch out, every little map zoom or slide seems to put another url in your browser history. Not exaggerating here, must have found over 100 of them after just a minute or so of playing with the page

".. meat doesn't scale"

For better or worse, that pretty much captures everthing you need to know about the remainder of your s/w career these days, if you think about it

Ah, that. When we did that back in the day, the Old Ones, the ones who made us, called that the "deer in the headlights" expression.

Incredible low contrast font color in use there. Looks like about 0x002000 on pure black (per Mk-1 eyeball).

What possesses people to go for these barely perceptible color schemes?

.. a few minutes later ..

Ok, the crazy low contrast was on the initial landing page. Things have somewhat improved after prodding somewhat blindly at it.

I'll let the question stand though, bc why do that for what's going to be people's first impression?

That 6809 bewitched my middle school self. Having already learnt Z80 assembly language, the 6809 just looked so much more elegant. It had index registers that were actually useful! It had position independent code! It could do multiplication in one instruction! So when faced with choosing a CoCo or a C64 .. of course I chose the machine with the MUL instruction. Naturally, within mere months, that horrid 32x16 black on green display forced the harsh realization that a computer is more than just the CPU, that the support chips could actually be far more interesting. Who cares about a multiply instruction, when you could have sprites and 3 voice sound?

My worst hardware choice (later) was to save with a monochrome VGA screen to afford a 24pin Fujitsu dot matrix vs the 9pin Epson. It forged the person I am today.

Go fast and break things, meet go slow and make things.

Yes, in the old systems, you'd get about 90 volts AC down the line to ring the mechanical bell ringer. Once saw a guy nearly fall off a ladder, splicing phone lines with bare hands. He thought the relatively low voltage was safe enough, but then someone rang him in the middle of the job.

I know 30+ years ago as I kid I learned this in my parents basement as I was rigging something up.

It is more the surprise, as if one is ignorant to this fact it is not expected at all.

I had to refresh my memory about the hybrid use of AC and DC current in telephone networks.

The Alternating Current signals could be used over longer distances and were effective at making the bells ring, moving the clapper back and forth. This back-and-forth is exactly what makes AC so deadly in the body, should it cross through your cardiac muscles, for example, and set the muscles twitching at 50 or 60 times per second.

There’s nothing inherently deadly about AC nor anything inherently safe about DC. If there’s enough voltage available to drive current through your body, then electricity is deadly regardless of if it’s AC or DC.

In general AC tends to be a little safer than DC, because the voltage is constantly reversing, which means it’s constantly passing through 0V, creating moments where you don’t have current driving through your body and forcing all your muscles to contract. Those 0V crossings create moments where you can let go of whatever is electrocuting you. DC on the other hand has no such 0 crossings, if there’s enough voltage there to drive current through you, then all your muscles will be stuck contracting until either the power is turned off, or until they’re all so fried they’re not physically capable of contracting anymore.

That could probably be one failure mode.