28 Feb
2013
28 Feb
'13
12:50 p.m.
Message: 25 Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 09:45:17 -0700 From: ben
<bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re:
Raspberry Pi Message-ID: <512F899D.2020803 at jetnet.ab.ca> Content-Type:
text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed On 2/28/2013 9:19 AM,
Liam Proven wrote:
On 28 Feb 2013 15:07, "ben" <bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
On 2/27/2013 5:34 PM, geneb wrote:
On Wed, 27 Feb 2013, Tony Duell wrote:
I don't know how that got sent half-done!
Problaby becuase you are using some modern device....
Why don't you create a device with the equivalent (at least) abilities
of the Raspberry Pi, but with your "enhancements" and sell it for $35.
Until that happens, I suggest you sit down, shut up and quit being a
cranky tonker.
g.
I disagree here. That is mass market prices.
Yes, of course. That is the entire point of the exercise. How small & cheap
can one make a reasonably modern computer that can surf the web and run
modern graphical programming tools such as Scratch.
The answer is, ?25 - and I think that is pretty impressive.
I want a computer *Done* right.
HP calculators ~ 1975 was the last computing device I have seen done
right.
What does that mean?
Build quality doesn't really enter into it. It's a single, credit-card
sized PCB.
It has an under-specified processor & an over-specified graphics chip, but
they are what was available cheaply from the day job of the designers.
It's not as open as I'd like.
But for the money, it is stunning.
What would you have done differently? Bear in mind the price point. Equal
or lower price only. What would you change?
That "low price is best trend" I would change. For me a modern
programing tool is "text editor" and 80x24 text screen on 15" display.
Explain to me why a cheap PC in my home can't keep up to the net
(windows 7) and a credit card computer can do better for surfing.
Ben.
"Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system."
Seymoure Cray
******************************************************************************************************
Past and the future of computing is forever changing as what we
believe to be true of the past isn?t always right. Something comes
along and revision is necessary. One more thing; I apologize for
bringing Computing the old way - Is it a thing of the past? but I have
to add this: Is the Raspberry Pi something we want to experience? Can
we teach kids how computers work today? Is there a need to do this! As
far as I can determine they want them to work when they turn them on;
not to know how they do something! Just do it! That?s their attitude
and mass-marketers know this. Sorry about this rant.
I?ll add this: No Internet; no multi-media may be what people want:
A 1980?s computing technology where word processing, spreadsheet(ing)
and database(ing) is just what many want!
Here are three quotes that sum up my view:
Pliny the Younger wrote: Historia quoquo modo scripta delectat.
History, however it is written, always pleases(!).
And paraphrasing Gotschke, the microcomputer was pre-determined,
?unfolded as by fate, as by a biological metamorphosis?.
And finally, Ted Nelson, of Computer Lib fame, writes: ?The strange
thing is that all of this took so long(development of the personal
computer) and then happened so suddenly.?
Murray--
4 Mar
4 Mar
9:04 a.m.
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...
******************************************************************************************************
Past and the future of computing is forever changing as what we
believe to be true of the past isn?t always right. Something comes
along and revision is necessary. One more thing; I apologize for
bringing Computing the old way - Is it a thing of the past? but I have
to add this: Is the Raspberry Pi something we want to experience? Can
we teach kids how computers work today? Is there a need to do this! As
far as I can determine they want them to work when they turn them on;
not to know how they do something! Just do it! That?s their attitude
and mass-marketers know this. Sorry about this rant.
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:
I?ll add this: No Internet; no multi-media may be
what people want:
A 1980?s computing technology where word processing, spreadsheet(ing)
and database(ing) is just what many want!
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
6:40 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
7:16 p.m.
On 4 March 2013 23:40, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:
Liam Proven wrote on Mon, 4 Mar 2013 14:04:40 +0000:
I agree.
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.
Well, and also because it's an ARM machine, and ARM was an Acorn
project - those in Britain who know about this are very proud of it -
and also because there is a strong, positive link in the British
mindset between the BBC, the BBC Micro and education.
The Spectrum was not seen as a serious computer; despite being, to be
honest, and I speak as an owner & one who adores the machines, a
rubbish games machine, that is nonetheless what it became.
The CBM C64, the various Ataris and all the other successful home
computers were really pure games machines, with fancy graphics, stereo
sound, built-in joystick ports and so on.
The only /serious/ 1980s home computers - the ones /not/ mainly used
for games, that were also used for education, from primary
schoolchildren up to extensive use in universities, was the BBC Micro
family.
Since I design computers for children using a
Smalltalk microprocessor,
How fascinating! Do tell?
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.
I can only agree.
p.s.: this email was written in Celeste, a Smalltalk
application
:?D
I have a passing interest in Smalltalk. Interesting language, if a bit
weird. As it happens, my Ex is a Smalltalk developer and makes a lot
of money doing it.
--
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
5 Mar
5 Mar
2:11 p.m.
Liam Proven wrote on Tue, 5 Mar 2013 00:16:44 +0000:
This is way off topic for this list unless you consider the Smalltalk
virtual machine to be a classic computer and what I am doing equivalent
to someone putting a PDP-11 in a FPGA. In some ways FPGAs are so
abstract that you might as well be doing just simulations, like in the
famous "From NAND to Tetris" course. By adding a few steps before you
get to the FPGA, however, it can be much more educational. Etienne
Delacroix (from Belgium, but he spent years in South America working
with children and university students) likes to start his "atelier labs"
by building simple gates from transistors and resistors, then more
interesting circuits with TTLs before repeating the projects with a Z80
and software.
He didn't like that the Z80 is a black box, and so wanted to build his
own processor from TTLs. He found a description from a one instruction
machine (substract and branch if negative) on the Internet and I
designed a board for him with 12 TTLs and did the macros in "as" so he
could put his simple Z80 programs on it. I don't feel the result is very
educational - the hardware is too simplistic and the complexity gets
hidden elsewhere (the macro expansions generate huge binaries).
An option is to have more layers, where the transition from one layer to
the next isn't too radical. From the top down, we have:
1) very high level programming for games and 3D shared virtual worlds:
Scratch, Etoys and OpenCobalt/OpenCroquet/OpenQwaq
http://scratch.mit.edu/
http://www.squeakland.org/
http://www.opencobalt.org/
2) Smalltalk text level
Squeak Smalltalk, Pharo, Self and other Smalltalks
www.squeak.org
http://www.pharo-project.org/home
http://selflanguage.org/
3) Smalltalk bytecode level
stack bytecodes, jump bytecodes, send bytecodes, special bytecodes
https://github.com/4ji/Smalltalk-Bluebook-chapter-26-30
4) microcode level
16 bit instruction set described in:
http://www.merlintec.com/download/jecelwplcr.pdf
5) cache level
most of the registers visible in level 4 don't really exist and are
instead mapped to the four caches
6) hardware level
logic gates
Some outdated information about the project can be found at:
http://www.siliconsqueak.org/
That is great to hear (that someone is making use of the language).
This morning I was thinking that I was too subtle - to get my reference
you would have to know that some of the email applications on the Xerox
Alto were "Laurel", "Hardy" and "Babar" and that Babar and
Celeste were
characters (talking elephants) from a 1930s series of children's
stories.
-- Jecel
Well, and also because it's an ARM machine, and
ARM was an Acorn
project - those in Britain who know about this are very proud of it -
And so they should be, and they should be proud of the Inmos Transputer
too though that is no longer with us (except through its echo, the
Xmos).
and also because there is a strong, positive link in
the British
mindset between the BBC, the BBC Micro and education.
The Raspberry Pi people actually tried to make the same deal with the
BBC, but it was no longer possible because current laws don't allow that
kind of partnership anymore. But the project did get mentioned in a BBC
blog and that is how the world found out about it a bit too early.
The first prototype used two Atmel AVR8 processors instead of an ARM.
One generated video in software while the other ran the Python
interpreter (but for some reason they decided to call it "Pi" instead of
"Py"). The second prototype used a Broadcom chip which made it cheaper
and the Python interpreter much faster, but it was only the third
prototype that added the ARM and made it into a general purpose machine.
The current board design was changed twice after that, but the main chip
remained the same.
Since I design
computers for children using a Smalltalk microprocessor,
How fascinating! Do tell? p.s.: this
email was written in Celeste, a Smalltalk application
:?D
I have a passing interest in Smalltalk. Interesting language, if a bit
weird. As it happens, my Ex is a Smalltalk developer and makes a lot
of money doing it.
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c.murray.mccullough＠gmail.com -
jecel＠merlintec.com -
lproven＠gmail.com