Introduction
As a retired public health practitioner, advocate and educator, I am always concerned that people are able to understand, manage and make meaningful the various factors that influence their personal, social, communal and societal health. The computational world thoroughly saturates our daily lives. As such, it profoundly influences our health and well-being. One of my life-long goals has been to gain and maintain a sufficient degree of what be called computational sovereignty.
In a certain sense, this site will present a curriculum, if you will, that teaches much more than how to code stories. It will seek to build a mental model of resilience. Adaptability: Hopefully, the young people of my grandchildren's generation can pivot from high-level web apps to bare-metal drivers. Understanding: They will know why abstractions exist because they have built them from scratch...but, they won't be enamoured of the glamour of such abstractions. Suviving and Thriving: In a world of increasing fragility, they will posses the skills to bootstrap technology from the ashes of geopolitical instability, ensuring that they are never helpless victims of the "device paradigm."
The goal is not merely to teach young people how to code beyond the frameworks and abstractions. The goal is to hand on the keys to civilization.
Upon the Way
By starting with the familiar and peeling back layers of abstraction, we can equip our grandchildren's generation with computational sovereignty--the ability to understand, rebuild, and adapt technology regardless of the external conditions influencing their lives.
- The Ubiquitous Presence: The Hook (Electron & Web Instrumentalities)
- Buy In: Leverage existing interest in HTML/CSS/JavaScript to build standalone story and game platforms using Electron.
- Goal: Immediate creative gratification. Participants seeing themselves as creators rather than mere consumers, breaking the initial "device paradigm" barrier where technology is a magic black box.
- Outcome: Functional applications that participants own, running on modern hardware they understand.
- The Memory Retrieval: Uncovering Operating System Foundations
- The Node.js Revelation: Showing them that the "magic" of Node.js is simply nothing more or less than a C Program (libuv) running an event loop. This bridges high-level scripting with system reality.
- The LAD Challenge: Introducing the Linux Appliance Design (LAD) approach. Building a C daemon manually forces them to manage memory, file descriptors, and Inter-process Communication (IPC) without a safety net.
- Unix v6/7: Transitioning to xv6 (MIT's educational Unix). Its entire source code fits in a single book (~100 pages), making the OS comprehensible in a way modern kernels never could be. They learn that an OS is just another program.
- The Strategic Advance: Common Roots and Shared Resilience
- MOS6502 & Assembly: Connecting to our generation's personal and collective history. The MOS6502 (used in Apple II, NES, Commodore 64) has only 56 instructions. Writing Assembly here makes the CPU's fetch-decode-execute cycle tangible.
- Forth & Scamp3: Moving to the Scamp3 microcontroller takes them to the engaging world of the Internet of Things (IoT) and beyond. Forth's interactive, stack-based nature teaches direct hardware control with minimal RAM (kilobytes, not gigabytes). It emphasises thinking creatively in terms of problem-solving within constraints.
- Collapse OS:: The method culminates with the Collapse OS developed by Virgil Dupras. He originally wrote the OS in Assembly, but refactored it in Forth which provides for greater portability. Designed to run on scavenged Z80/6502 hardware in a post-collapse scenario, it represents the ultimate test of self-sufficiency. It proves that computing can survive, and even thrive, should the global supply chain ever chuck a wobbly.