Raspberry Pi

On 28 February 2013 17:50, Murray McCullough <c.murray.mccullough at gmail.com> wrote: Because your quoting is all over the place, I am not certain which bit you wrote, so I am going to assume that it's the part under the line of stars... To answer someone else's objection to my earlier point - that a BBC Micro isn't a computer any more, as it's too limited to do anything that forms part of 21st century computing, from opening a .DOC or a .PDF to rendering a JPG to opening a web page to running a Java applet... The Rpi is an attempt to make a desktop computer - GUI, desktop, WWW, USB ports etc. - for the lowest possible price, using as little power as reasonably possible, so that it needs no cooling, can run from batteries or solar power, is entirely solid-state with no moving parts: kid-friendly, developing-world friendly, environmentally-friendly, works with plain COTS parts and peripherals and is so cheap as to be disposable. But you raise an interesting point: Well, actually, yes, perhaps so. I don't think it's a widespread want, no, but I think that there is room for a gadget that is perhaps a modern Amstrad PCW rather and a modern Sinclair Spectrum. In my view, the Rpi is the Spectrum /de nos jours./ In its time, the Spectrum ticked all the boxes for a 1982 home computer at the lowest possible price: * colour graphics * sound * the standard software of the time, i.e., a BASIC interpreter * built-in keyboard that was just barely usable & a step up from a membrane * drove a TV and a cassette recorder and nothing else * had an optional printer * had a single expansion port, but one that was open enough to drive almost any peripheral the 3rd party market could come up with The Rpi is the same. Just enough RAM, just enough storage in the universal format, the most forward-looking standard display output, the minimum useful number of the most standard ports, just quick enough to run the standard software - i.e. a desktop OS & a web browser. The Amstrad PCW was something different. It was just enough computer to *work* on. To perform a useful role in business. It had almost /less/ sound and graphics than the 3Y older Spectrum. I wonder if a teaching computer might take a different view from the modern OS - i.e. perhaps something like the original vision of Jef Raskin for a computer that ran entirely in a text editor with no discrete "apps". Or, a modern re-implementation of a Lisp Machine or Xerox Smalltalk box: a mouse-and-keyboard-driven GUI, but the whole user-visible OS in a human-readable high-level language that people could read and modify the code of as it was working. Lisp is a bit arcane - Dylan seems like the best possible contender to me. However, I do see, for a machine to be of any possible use, that the ability to cope with de facto C21 standards is a sine qua non. * FAT16, FAT32 * MS Office formats * Zip & other common compression tools * TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, POP3/IMAP * HTML 5 This forms quite a high barrier to entry. For instance, Acorn RISC OS doesn't really qualify any more. It can't do Javascript so much of Web 2 is inaccessible from it, for instance. It doesn't understand most of the standard file-formats out there as it has its own weird 1980s versions of them all. OTOH, considered as a 1980s single-tasking OS which fits in 8MB or so of ROM, it comes closer than anything else that I know. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884