I had a great time this morning talking to my sons' classes about computers. We go the two classes together (one Sr. Kindergarten class and one Grade 1 class) and I spent half an hour talking to them about computers.

I asked how many kids had computers at home. Everyone put up their hands. Ok, how many have more than 5 computers at home? Most hands go down. But there are computers in your video game boxes, your microwaves, your cars, your leap-pads, your tamogotchi's and your DVD players. Now, how many have more than 5 computers in your house? Most hands go back up again. I told them that when I was their age, NOBODY had ANY computers at home. Home computers only started to appear with I was around 15 years old and in Grade 10.

I passed around hand-wired circuit boards, chips, motherboards, and even a Pentium processor. I showed them a transistor and asked them how many transistors were in the CPU chip (a Pentium). Some guessed 1 million - one guessed "infinity". I told them that in a modern Pentium chip, there are about 125 million. Suppose we put 125 million transistors like this one onto a square board and packed them as tightly as we could. The board would almost cover their whole school.

To show them what programming was like, I launched Squeak and gave Alice (the 3D bunny with a drum) some Smalltalk commands. That was a huge hit. The one they loved the most was "destroy" which explodes the bunny.

I showed them how I could turn my computer keyboard into a piano (with ElastoLab) and played a song for them.

They were amazed that the first home computers were nothing like computers today. One asked "You mean, you had no Internet?" Nope. No keyboard, no screen, no mouse. My first computer was a home-brewed 1802 system with 12 switches, two hex displays, and a LED that could turn on and off. It had 256 bytes of memory.

What a lot of fun. I wish I could make a living going from school to school talking about computers.