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Hi all,

I just want to introduce myself, say hello, and explain what we have been doing recently on the Dragon.



Like many of you on the board, I expect you grew up with the Dragon, I remember bringing ours home in around 1983 (aged 9 or 10) and was immediately hooked. Like many of you too, we did not have parents that could program, or had interest, so we are self taught.

After maybe 20 years of the Dragon being stored in its box, moved from house to house and pushed from pillar to post like Yesterdays Jam* I fired it up and it worked beautifully for the first time. It was like meeting an old friend, and we carried on where we left off.

I got the Dragon out because we have taken our eldest daughter out of the state school system and are education her at home. I work for myself, and will be responsible for teaching computer skills. What better place to start that journey than programming BASIC on the Dragon?!

There is a little write up here: http://homeschooljournal.co.uk/2015/11/ ... dragon-32/ if you are interested.

Anyway, hello forum members

* 10 points if you can tell me where that Yesterdays Jam phrase comes from. No searching!

Welcome to the forum!

Yesterday's jam comes from the first episode of the IT Crowd, if I'm not mistaken, hehe

Enjoy your stay here!

Yes, welcome to the forum!

Your experience strikes a chord as I feel a lot of the skills I use in my job are self taught and started in some way with the Dragon.

Apologies to the other members for the OT but I enjoyed browsing around your home school journal. My wife and I agree with much of what you're saying about state education and we've seriously considered home schooling our son. We applaud your courage.

This is a bit of a coincidence as I had just read your very similar article at The Register which gave me a reminder that I hadn't visited the Dragon Archive today, so I pop over here and what do I find? The very person who wrote the article posting on the forum! As others have already said, welcome to the Dragon's little place on the web.

Welcome to the forum.

It's great that your children are learning about programming on your trusty old Dragon.

The 8-bit home computer era certainly had a profound affect on children in the eighties. I've known games coders who left school at 16 because they were earning more than the teachers.

A great article - and welcome! Perhaps it's time I prized the iPad out of my 13yr old daughter's hands, and set up a Dragon for her to play with too!

I agree with Bosco and Stew. I wasn't much older than my daughter is now when I got my Dragon, and I was completely self taught - there were no computers at my school, and my parents didn't understand it (although I did learn all about binary and the basics of how a computer works as part of a badge at scouts - my only formal training in computing!).

I also remember being extremely frustrated by my computer science degree. I couldn't see the point in Cobol, systems analysis, flowcharts - models designed for the days of mainframes with spinning tapes. We still used punch cards to program PL/1, for heaven's sake! But we did have a lab of Dragons, used for the module on assembly programming (little know-it-all that I was, I knew far more than the lecturer). I left, because I knew that micro-computers were the future, and if I wanted to learn about them, I had to continue teaching myself. That ability to teach myself new skills has stood me in good stead ever since, I'm still picking up new skills now - and it all started with a Dragon!

Hi,
welcome to the forum!
Hope you will find here a 'second' family
It seems that our first computer was our 'programmimg' school and certainly a lot of people
ended working in what had begun as a hobby. That is true for me too!

cheers
pere

Hello. Welcome to the forum!