[Coco] Using my CoCo for teaching

[Joe Grubbs]

A few friends and I teach a JavaScript class a couple nights a week. It's through a Meetup group, and we generally get a pretty enthusiastic crowd. Sometimes recruiters show up and offer free food and swag. Overall it's a pretty cool deal.

Anyway, lately my teaching focus has been on NodeJS. While trying to think of a topic to cover for last night's class, I happened to glance at the serial port class library for Node, and this gave me a hair brained idea that would allow me to leverage my obsession with retro-computing. I decided to discuss and demonstrate the creation of a DLOAD server in Node. 

The actual coding didn't get very far last night because our discussion sort of went off on all kinds of crazy tangents: Color Computer history, Radio Shack's bankruptcy, RS-232 protocol, and somehow even teletype machines. However much my to relief everyone seemed enthusiastic about the idea, especially after I showed them the DLOAD protocol documentation. 

Next time I'm bringing one of my CoCo2s with me and we're going to try to make some magic happen. If it doesn't work, then oh well, it would have still been a fun and effective teaching exercise.

Just figured I'd share. Carry on!

-Joe