4 Mar
2013
4 Mar
'13
8:40 p.m.
On 03/04/2013 06:54 PM, allison wrote:
;) cheap still usable PCs are a dime (often free) a
dozen now. its been
that way since about 1998. The generational turnover insured plenty
of used but still good hardware for free or cheap. the only machines
I'd ever bought new were a few EeePCs (701 and 901 running linux)
when they first came out as they were so cheap and oddly I still have
use for them.
I splurged around Christmastime and bought my first NEW "barebones" PC
in perhaps 6 or 7 years--I paid $159 for motherboard, memory, CPU and
case and DVD drive. Before that I'd used a castoff Socket 478 system
with 2GB of memory that I got for nothing--all it needed was a simple
motherboard trace repair. The display was a circa-2000 NEC 20" LCD
display, that needed some minor repairs in the PSU--I got that for
nothing as well. In 2000, it would have set you back about $4000.
It was a continuation of a pattern--I used to cruise the alleys for
discarded radios and later, TVs for parts.
All of my keyboards in daily use are surplus Model Ms--the one I"m
currently using says "Wang" on it.
So all told, I had less than $100 in that rig.
The new bare-bones PC is less than impressive to me. It's got a
quad-core 3GHz AMD CPU in it running some flavor of Ubuntu. A
Virtualbox session is loaded with XP for those things that Ubuntu can't
accommodate. It's okay, but I can't claim to be more productive with it
than the old box. I recently splurged for a couple of refurb NEC 19"
($70 shipped) displays, not for "work", but for musical
transcription--I can have a transcription program up on one display and
the other with a manuscript on it near my (MIDI) keyboard.
The point is that there's hardware out there for almost nothing if you
know what you're doing. The main advantage of an RPi is that it's ready
to go and inexpensive. It may not advance your learning much, however.
As others have observed.
Compare that with my first 8-bit "hobbyist" setup--a MITS 8800 kit with
8KB of shaky TI DRAM and no peripherals for $1000 1975
pre-hyperinflation dollars. I was excited to have it, even though my
day job involved working with multi-million dollar supercomputers, to
which I had pretty much unfettered access. That was interesting, but
the little MITS box was interesting in a very different, much more
intimate way. I'd been scheming about how I was going to make an 8008
machine (and before that my own CPU design), had written a
cross-assembler and emulator for one and then had my life changed by the
8080.
Go spend, what $30 on a Digilent 80 MHz PIC32 implementation of an
Arduino board. You've easily got a couple or more orders of magnitude
more processing power than that 8080--and more interesting peripherals
and memory.
Computing has never been so cheap.
Don't like the current architectures? Spend somewhat more and buy an
FPGA devkit and design your own--you don't even have to know how to
solder and the development tools are free.
Computing has never been so easy.
--Chuck