I’m curious about what special technical skills new students at the MIT level are in possession of. For example, what percentage of MIT new entrants can solder reliably, or program, particularly in machine code?
These were nerd skills of yesteryear.
Grab a piece of copper coated bakelite out of your project box, scrape it off with a penknife, some soldering and…voila! A guitar filter or a logic gate.
You could make Z80s or 8080s actually do something at the blistering speed of 2 MHz.
Late night discussions about improvements to the RS-232.
Debug anything. As long as it was in BASIC, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal or C.
Get a new mainframe account? You could own console by the weekend.
Free long distance calls home courtesy of the Phreaker in the corner room.
I’m just curious since I recently watched some HS engineering students coordinating efforts to download some drivers to their “robot”.
@JustOneDad
Not sure what you are asking… are you asking what skills we have now, or if skills have been (relatively) lost over the years?
As an applicant, I do possess some older-style nerd skills (I guess). I can’t program very well yet, but I sure can solder stuff together. A lot of this comes as part of doing electronics as a hobby, but since I dabble a little in phone and laptop repair I’ve had a little experience with soldering smaller stuff than the average hobbyist. This means going down past QFP and SOIC IC packages, all the way to QFN packages. These things are tiny, and you can’t solder them with a normal soldering iron outside of customized hobby boards. That means for anything retail, you have to go with a rework station of some kind in order to repair a chip. I currently run a used Hakko station with a preheater. The process takes some effort, and you’ve got to be really careful to literally not cook the motherboard the chip is on, but it’s doable.
Well, mostly I was wondering how nerdified students were at entrance. Since there hasn’t been much response past yours, I guess that might answer the question.
@JustOneDad
I’m a member of the MIT applicants group of facebook, and I can say from what is presented there, the nerdiness exists in every form possible amongst the applicants. There are those with their own businesses, their own charity startups, those who love to drop mixtapes, a gaggle of physics nerds, web designers, crafters, athletes, statisticians, researchers, writers, coders, and more. It’s a pretty incredible display of talent!
Don’t you dare disrespect the legendary Zilog Z80! That chip is the ground upon which Pokemon is built, so disrespecting the Z80 is disrespecting Pokemon!
