There's plenty of critics & inadequacies. And yeah, it was kinda slow as hell. But damn, 10+ years ago this was so ultra ambitious a hardware platform, given th

There's plenty of critics & inadequacies. And yeah, it was kinda slow as hell. But damn, 10+ years ago this was so ultra ambitious a hardware platform, given the absurdly low price target. Which never scaled into efficiency! But much more so, the software ideas were so interesting. We criticize the platform readily for being used as just another OS, but who else has dared to try to build a learnable intelligible computer? Who else has better ideas we can talk about? Taking the already existing DBus that underpins the rest of the FreeDesktop world was smart. Using meshed link-local XMPP to network DBus was a hop switch and jump further, reusing so much, but making an interesting cross-system networked application, one that was learnable & understandable & in reach as well as powerful & networked. Such a smart way to take what already was & go just a little further. I really wish there had been a longer run of trying to grow into it. Most remarkable to me is that there haven't been any attempts at constructivist systems since. We can pan and dump on this aplenty, but what are we doing to try to give broad views of computing to kids, to make accessible the system itself? Who else has tried? This was a great economical attempt given very little time space and opportunity to grow into itself, and that's a shame.