We need to build more educational computers

When I was a kid, I had this absolutely wonderful educational computer called Digi-Comp. It was very simple, with only three bits of state, and that was fine for learning an awful lot of basic stuff about computers. And it was sturdy as anything. I must have disassembled and reassembled it hundreds of times and it never broke and never stopped working. Somebody needs to design a 21st century mechanical computer using an inexpensive service like Ponoko or Shapeways or 100kGarages or Big Blue Saw to do laser cutting or 3D printing.

When I was in college, I saved up money to buy a KIM-1 single-board computer with a 6502 microprocessor, a hexadecimal keypad, and six seven-segment digit displays. I learned a lot of what became my career playing with that thing, writing little assembly language programs, soldering TTL chips to it, and generally having a great time. When I left school, I bought an old ASR-33 teletype from the school's department for retiring obsolete junk, and used it to give the KIM-1 a 300 baud line printer. Back in those days we had extraordinarily low thresholds of entertainment. Still, it was educational.

We need to be building more of this kind of stuff today. The things we build need to be easily hackable and easy to form user communities around. I guess you could say we already have something like the KIM-1 with today's Arduino, but it never fills me with intrigue like the KIM-1 did, where you were literally typing in machine opcodes onto that hex keypad, and they're showing up in the LED digits. It gives you a real sense of intimacy with the entire process of computation. Compiling C code never gets you quite that close to the action.

If you regard the Digi-Comp and the KIM-1 as two points along a spectrum of sophistication, we probably ought to plan on a third more advanced point, given that the KIM-1 is about 30 years old now. I've been doing some puttering with ARM-7 and ARM-9 boards of various kinds, some so capable as to run Linux, and I think that's a good third point because that's the kind of hardware that appears in modern consumer devices.