5 ms·

My family had two computers as I grew up - a 486 and a Pentium II. We were quite poor, and both purchases were a monumental event, made possible by unexpected w

My family had two computers as I grew up - a 486 and a Pentium II. We were quite poor, and both purchases were a monumental event, made possible by unexpected windfalls. I shudder to think what would have happened if they broke prematurely, or the circumstances which led to them being purchased never came about. Certainly my career would have been set back many years (I released my first commercial game - though it made little money - at 15). I was fortunate enough to be a "have", and get the opportunity to learn computing from an early age. I'm a digital native. My proximity to the line of separation makes me think quite a bit about how much worse my life would be without that initial investment. Especially while I'm playing the guitar, which I picked up and enjoy playing badly as an adult (with the money I made from computing), but didn't have access to as a kid. If my talents were in music rather than computing, I'd be flipping burgers right now. It's amazing to me that in this day and age you can get a computer good enough to do serious work on for the price of my last meal. You could learn to program, get contract work, and complete that work entirely from a Raspberry Pi (and a TV or second hand monitor, kb/mouse etc). The dropping of the price of entry level computing has been happening for some time, but we really are to the point that no western kid is missing out due to the cost alone (there are unfortunately still other reasons). Computing has long celebrated its meritocratic nature, but being meritocratic for the middle class and up wasn't ever really something to be proud of. I'm pretty sure by that yardstick yacht racing is meritocratic, too. The world will be such a rich place when each child has the ability to thoroughly search the space of what is potentially interesting to them, and have the means, encouragement and material available to pursue it while they are free from the constraints of adult life. I think we're making great progress there, and it's one of the only aspects of how we are progressing into the future that I am unreservedly excited about. As countries get wealthier and costs continue to fall, the trend will continue globally. I fully expect to end my career being thoroughly outclassed by ultra talented new kids on the block from Cambodia and Ethiopia, born in a decade or two, and nothing could make me happier. (If at that point I turn into a grumpy old man that whines about it when it happens, please do the world a favor and just shoot me.)

nuxi 12y ago
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this, it really resonated with me.
userbinator 12y ago
What most people don't seem to realise is that large corporations (and even schools) discard tons of perfectly functioning PC hardware every day, the vast majority of which are quite a lot more powerful (P4 or Core level, maybe even more) and open than an RPi, complete with all the necessary peripherals.
- custardcream 12y ago
  Yes this. My total computing outlay this year is £70 so far. That's £52 for the Samsung SSD (840 Evo) which was new, some rubber feet and a couple of keytops for an X201 I intercepted on the way to the recyclers and £8 for a wireless mouse. So for that, I got an industrial grade laptop with an i5 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD... That's less than a Pi with a suitable monitor/TV to attach to it. (I haven't included the MSDN account copy of Windows 8.1 Pro because I didn't pay for that ;-)
- yzzxy 12y ago
  This is true, but the logistics and maintenance of a full fleet of those computers is far greater than a set of identical Pis that an admin can flash new cards for on demand.
bane 12y ago
This is great. I agree with all of this. I also grew up poor, but for some reason my family always had some kind of computing device near. Never top-end, rarely popular: TRS-80, Coleco Adam, etc. though we really never knew much about computing, I think it was my father's endless fascination with them that made them ever present. I frequently visited my friends who all had C-64s, Mac Classics and Amigas and we'd spend hours tooling around on them. Then somewhere along the way, my parents splurged and bought a 386sx with 2MB of RAM (so I could run Windows) and I was hooked. I remember buying my first soundcard (a SoundBlaster) so I could play .mod files, installing it was a harrowing experience, nobody in my family had ever seen the guts of a computer that wasn't broken (and rendered into pieces out of curiosity). I started getting modems, external at first until I exceeded the speed of the UART and installed my second expansion card and I think it was around that point that I was hooked. I kind of felt like I was hot rodding. My first real job was at a mom and pop computer repair shop where I learned to resurrect by then ancient machines and bring to life top of the line Pentiums. Along the way I bought and built several of my own machines out of spare parts lying around the shop, the pinnacle was a 486dx2-66 with 8MB of RAM, a decent machine at the time...built for around $50. My friends, knowing I had an inside line and the knowhow started buying parts, memory, whatever through me. It felt like the ascendancy of power. I won a Pentium Pro motherboard at a conference drawing and spent a couple month's wages completing the rest of the system, it lasted me for years. I remember when a local computer store ran a promotion, "Computer for $1000!" and the line was out the door and around the block. It made the Windows 95 release madness look tame. People were thirsty for affordable, accessible, usable computing. Most people in that line were buying their first computer and had no idea what they were going to do with it. The store solved that by giving out disks for a local free ISP they could dial in and suddenly thousands of people in my area were connected to millions of other people. I'm continuously in awe of how powerful an affordable computing has become. A $200 device that also happens to be a phone is an order of magnitude better computer than the one those people were standing in line hours for. It's also connected to the same Internet, but the things we can do on that internet today are orders of magnitude bigger. I do worry about today's kids in a sense, they'll never know the joy of learning to build a boot disk from scratch so they can play their favorite game, the OSs are simply too complicated for that kind of fooling around. The entire OS, including a BASIC of my 386sx fit on a couple floppies, came with a few games and was only a few dozen files. In some ways the Pi brings lots of that back, it's bareboned enough that you have to figure it out to get it to work. But I wonder how popular it's actually been with kids getting into cheap computing vs. adults looking for something cheap to tinker on?

nuxi 12y ago

Just wanted to say thank you for writing this, it really resonated with me.

userbinator 12y ago

What most people don't seem to realise is that large corporations (and even schools) discard tons of perfectly functioning PC hardware every day, the vast majority of which are quite a lot more powerful (P4 or Core level, maybe even more) and open than an RPi, complete with all the necessary peripherals.

custardcream 12y ago
Yes this. My total computing outlay this year is £70 so far. That's £52 for the Samsung SSD (840 Evo) which was new, some rubber feet and a couple of keytops for an X201 I intercepted on the way to the recyclers and £8 for a wireless mouse. So for that, I got an industrial grade laptop with an i5 CPU, 4Gb of RAM and a 120Gb SSD... That's less than a Pi with a suitable monitor/TV to attach to it. (I haven't included the MSDN account copy of Windows 8.1 Pro because I didn't pay for that ;-)
yzzxy 12y ago
This is true, but the logistics and maintenance of a full fleet of those computers is far greater than a set of identical Pis that an admin can flash new cards for on demand.

bane 12y ago

This is great. I agree with all of this. I also grew up poor, but for some reason my family always had some kind of computing device near. Never top-end, rarely popular: TRS-80, Coleco Adam, etc. though we really never knew much about computing, I think it was my father's endless fascination with them that made them ever present. I frequently visited my friends who all had C-64s, Mac Classics and Amigas and we'd spend hours tooling around on them. Then somewhere along the way, my parents splurged and bought a 386sx with 2MB of RAM (so I could run Windows) and I was hooked. I remember buying my first soundcard (a SoundBlaster) so I could play .mod files, installing it was a harrowing experience, nobody in my family had ever seen the guts of a computer that wasn't broken (and rendered into pieces out of curiosity). I started getting modems, external at first until I exceeded the speed of the UART and installed my second expansion card and I think it was around that point that I was hooked. I kind of felt like I was hot rodding. My first real job was at a mom and pop computer repair shop where I learned to resurrect by then ancient machines and bring to life top of the line Pentiums. Along the way I bought and built several of my own machines out of spare parts lying around the shop, the pinnacle was a 486dx2-66 with 8MB of RAM, a decent machine at the time...built for around $50. My friends, knowing I had an inside line and the knowhow started buying parts, memory, whatever through me. It felt like the ascendancy of power. I won a Pentium Pro motherboard at a conference drawing and spent a couple month's wages completing the rest of the system, it lasted me for years. I remember when a local computer store ran a promotion, "Computer for $1000!" and the line was out the door and around the block. It made the Windows 95 release madness look tame. People were thirsty for affordable, accessible, usable computing. Most people in that line were buying their first computer and had no idea what they were going to do with it. The store solved that by giving out disks for a local free ISP they could dial in and suddenly thousands of people in my area were connected to millions of other people. I'm continuously in awe of how powerful an affordable computing has become. A $200 device that also happens to be a phone is an order of magnitude better computer than the one those people were standing in line hours for. It's also connected to the same Internet, but the things we can do on that internet today are orders of magnitude bigger. I do worry about today's kids in a sense, they'll never know the joy of learning to build a boot disk from scratch so they can play their favorite game, the OSs are simply too complicated for that kind of fooling around. The entire OS, including a BASIC of my 386sx fit on a couple floppies, came with a few games and was only a few dozen files. In some ways the Pi brings lots of that back, it's bareboned enough that you have to figure it out to get it to work. But I wonder how popular it's actually been with kids getting into cheap computing vs. adults looking for something cheap to tinker on?