12 ms·
It's interesting how he talks about the raspberry pi: > The first was listening to Eben Upton, the brains behind the Raspberry Pi, describe that the number of
by Gracana 12y ago
It's interesting how he talks about the raspberry pi:
> The first was listening to Eben Upton, the brains behind the Raspberry Pi, describe that the number of qualified applicants to study computer science is dropping. Rather than learning how computers work at a more fundamental level, students are applying only with knowledge of webpage construction and high-level scripting languages. He argued that this is emblematic of a larger generational problem and the Raspberry Pi was his solution.
>> “Our idea was to build something cheap, powerful and available for children’s bedrooms so they could have the same experience we had.”
My impression of the Pi is that it's too complex for this sort of application. It's cheap and therefore easy to procure, but it runs a desktop operating system that is arguably more difficult to work with than the one on your regular desktop PC, and it has a weird architecture consisting of a CPU as a coprocessor of a proprietary GPU, with an inscrutable binary blob managing everything underneath. That's just too much to deal with if you're aiming for the 80s bedroom computing experience. I think there's still room for something that fills that niche. A modern "Commodore 64" needs to provide the same unfettered access to the internals, with similar simplicity, but with modern performance and amenities (better editors, better languages, built-in documentation, flexible communications and control options, etc).
- wlesieutre 12y agoThe closest I've gotten to that simple 80's computer experience is imaginary computers in Minecraft mods. Not exactly real-world applicable, but still a lot of fun. They're Lua scriptable with a simplified notion of networking and robots. OpenComputers is a bit more interesting than ComputerCraft, but it also turns the initial construction process into a giant multi-stepped resource-intensive pain. Recommend playing in creative mode if anybody's curious to just take a quick look.
- Fuzzwah 12y agoI was never a C64 hacker, my first computer was an Atari ST. It sparked my interest and lead me towards buying a 486 some years later. I open with that because I could very well be wrong...... But surely at the time the C64 had a "weird architecture" and some proprietary blobs? I do think that loading desktop linux onto an R-Pi results in a different kind of experience to a kid firing up a C64 and finding themselves at a basic prompt. However, it's pretty easy set up an R-Pi so that you're greeted by something similar..... Note: I've got 2 original R-Pi's and my R-Pi 2 arrived today. I also have a 1 year old girl who I hope to one day get excited about the kinds of things that these wonderful devices enable me to do play with.
- abecedarius 12y agoThe C64 came with a manual including the full memory map, what addresses to PEEK and POKE to control the sound chip, etc. "Proprietary blob" may be technically true in that the ROMs weren't open source, but it was simple, accessible, and documented enough that that doesn't well describe my experience with it. (Though it's not a machine I ever got deep into, myself.)
- cgh 12y agoYes, exactly. Strange as it is to say, possibly the closest thing running on modern hardware would be TempleOS.
- joezydeco 12y agoAgreed, the system isn't the "C64 of the 2010s" that it's been proclaimed to be. Unless there's a wave of success stores out there that I haven't seen. Mostly it's people using them as beefier Arduinos for their projects. But I wouldn't go as far to say all the Broadcom blob-nonsense is the hindering factor. That's completely a non-issue if we're talking about education. The reason the C64 and Apple and BBC Acorn were they way they were was because they booted right into a programming environment. Where's the autostart environment for the RPi?
- pjc50 12y agoOne of the early prototypes of the Pi was built around a microcontroller that bit-banged video output. It was a lot closer to the ultra-low-level experience that you describe. He decided it was just too alien an experience and too limited compared to a modern desktop PC - there's no way it could ever run a web browser, for example. A fundamental problem with the "modern C64" ideal is that the software stack is much deeper these days, especially in the browser. The nearest thing to your hardware-orientated version of simplicity would be something like this: http://hackaday.io/project/3877-layerone-demoscene-board http://hackaday.io/project/3877-layerone-demoscene-board which outputs raw VGA from a PIC24.