My daughter and son started using the computer at a young age.
See how serious my daughter appear at the computer keyboard in the picture below. Poor girl! The chair was too low for her and she had to stretch her neck to look at the monitor screen. She was about 6 years old when the picture was taken.
She had to learn the alphabets, numbers and common command keys on the keyboard, using the 'hunt and peck' typing method with one finger. When the "Mavis Typing Tutor" program was available several years later, she then learnt how to type properly with ten fingers.
The wooden computer cupboard, with a locking panel for the keyboard and disk-drives, was custom-made by a furniture designer friend. I had modified the original design and specifications which was published in an American computer magazine. It would have cost me a bomb to order it from the States and have it shipped to Singapore.
I attended DOS and BASIC computer lessons at the Pasir Panjang Community Center in the evening and class projects and assignments were done on the Apple IIe. I even program some simple arithmatic exercises on addition, subtraction, division and multiplication in DOS for the children. Nothing fanciful....just plain numbers and text with multiple choice questions. If they input the correct answers, the screen will prompt "Good" "Clever" or "Very Good" for the harder questions. If they input the wrong answers, the equation will loop repeatedly with "Try Again", "Try Again" until they input the correct answers. It was not programmed to display "Wrong. You Stupid!" when they did not input the correct answers :)
Original educational software was costly and not easily available. Those were pre-Internet days and shareware program could not be downloaded online like what most kids could do today.
On weekends, I used to bring my children to a small computer shop at Upper Serangoon Shopping Center where shareware software was sold. You will notice the plastic holder with a stack of 5.25" floppy diskettes. Each diskette stores only 360KB of data. Can you believe that?
The standard of the DOS-based games are primitive compared to the virtual games which are available on the market today. The graphic was created in ASCII. No 16-million high-color resolution, no sound, no animation, no interactive mouse-pointing contact, no real-time online Internet gaming with multiple-players..... just the keyboard and a mono-color screen (as those in the days of the Black-and-White TV. You can only play with the computer. Yet it was the best indoor activities the kids could get at that time....and they still found it fun and a novelty!
So it was really very 'yesterday' wasn't it?
In future, when we are connected to the Martians and have "Inter-Terresterial Internet" (ITI), the kind of Internet experience we have today will also become primitive and 'yesterday'....
