udougc (06/30/82)
I very much agree, a home computer is a good and not such an expensive way to provide basic computer literacy and comfort for a child. My son is much younger than T.W.H.'s, now 12 but we have had this TRS80 for about 3 years now and he had some dealings with terminals long before that. Even such simple things as "Hit ENTER after each response" are now routine and he can work faster and much more confortably on interactive systems than many of our medical students!!!!. This has many side effects from breezing through an elective on programming at school to being thedemonstrator for a career opportunites system on a school field trip to Winston Salem, of course he got to look at the information on the careers that he was interested in. This system with a cheeeeep printer and SCRIPSIT is now my tyepwriter. Many an alogorithm is debugged in BASIC before implementation in 360BAL for our interactive student information database, the trace and interupt/restart facilities of the interpreter are fantastic. Home budget on a tape system is a pain in the $%&$%&$%&$%& but doing it for about 6 months did away with much speculation about where all the money is going. Mailing list for a small club (c100-200) very usefull. Record filling, recipe retrival, etc systems, forget it. Games, fabulous, get young children comfortable with THE COMPUTER, encourage very basic reading skills. Fantasic as a terminal, even Kit has beeb introduced to electronic mail. My very longwinded opinion. Doug.