4 Mar
2013
4 Mar
'13
3:40 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote on Mon, 4 Mar 2013 14:04:40 +0000:
In my view, the Rpi is the Spectrum /de nos jours./
Exactly. And that is a good thing! The project's creators just keep
mentioning the BBC because that is what they happened to have as
children and because they are interested in classrooms instead of just
homes.
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.
Since I design computers for children using a Smalltalk microprocessor,
I can hardly be expected to have an impartial opinion about this. I
think there is room for the One Laptop Per Child, for the Raspberry Pi,
for the Arduino and also for a machine like you describe. If you give
computers to a million children and only one of those wants to find out
how the processor works and how to modify it, then they should be able
to do it. It has been suggested on this list that this could be achieved
with classic TTL based minicomputers, but I see a modern design built
with FPGAs as a good option.
-- Jecel
p.s.: this email was written in Celeste, a Smalltalk application