1982, ZX Spectrum, Sinclair Basic..... 6 years old. My mathematics has always been bad. I couldn't do long division at this age but it didn't stop me from learning how to program. My algebra too was much better early on in school but it didn't help with more advanced mathematics. I program for a living now and very rarely use complex maths, it's all about data flow and control for me. Just my $0.02 but I would go with Pascal if you can find the materials to teach. It's simple enough language with obvious syntax and can be taught in a short space of time. It's quick to get results from and leads well onto languages like C and Assembly.

Agreed again. My 16 month old baby screams if I don't let her near my PC. She gives the keyboard a good bashing and throws the mouse around like she caught a fish but if the screen doesn't respond to her she just gets mad. OLPC is a nice idea but I wouldn't let a two year old near any of the current netbooks unless they were on sedatives. MSI Wind in my personal opinion is like a yogurt carton and if you live in the UK the Advent netbook from PC World is the same model. Asus EEE is pretty tough and you might find some cheap 7" models on Ebay now if it's just for your child. If you want to use the same machine yourself I'd buy a Samsung NC10. I've owned all of the above machines (3 models of EEE) and the Samsung is the fastest and sturdiest.

Err.. I beg to differ too. If Google didn't have Gmail or search they wouldn't have anything to offer users.... so Gmail and search are the products. Secondly, the products have to be good for the user to 'advertise' them.

Mmmmm, lets just look at the open source scene 15 years ago.... just look at the shit loads of programmers who would have kindly contributed there skills free of charge to let you use your 'mass' produced $200,000 science equipment or your lumber machine.

The BASIC on a TRS-80 originated almost directly from Microsoft's BASIC that was originally written for the Altair in 1975. MS Basic kinda got standardised in around 1978 and I'm pretty sure it had an ANSI standard too. The BASIC on the ZX Spectrum was as far as I know based on that ANSI standard basic and because the TRS-80 and the Spectrum had the same CPU the majority of programs could be written in the same BASIC for both machines with just a little tweaking on a couple of commands. The CBM-BASIC seemed to veer off from the the 1978 standards quite a lot so in my opinion it was very different to any other BASIC out there.