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Eben Upton Remembers The Years Before the First Raspberry Pi (techrepublic.com)
Tech Republic re-visits the story of the earliest attempts to build the Raspberry Pi, and the dramatic launch of a quest "to rekindle the curiosity about computing in a generation immersed in technology but indifferent to how it worked."
[T]he dominant computers -- games consoles and later tablets and smartphones -- no longer offered an invitation to create, but rather to consume. Eben Upton recalls a bonfire party in 2007 where an 11-year-old boy told him he wanted to be an electrical engineer, and his disappointment at realizing the boy didn't have access to a computer he could program on. "I said, 'Oh, what computer have you got?'. He said, 'I've got a Nintendo Wii'. And there was just that awful feeling about there being a kid who was excited, a kid who was showing concrete interest in our profession, and who didn't have access to a programmable computer, a computer of any sort. He just had a games console."
At this time Upton was working as a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom, and realized he had the skills to try to halt this drift away from computers that encouraged users to code.
Upton describes the Raspberry Pi as "a very conscious attempt" to bring back the easily programmable home computers that he remembered as a child in the 1980s -- and he was gratified at its success. "Even early on you started to see those pictures of kids lying on the living room floor, looking up at the TV with Raspberry Pi plugged into it, the same way we used to."
It was named "Pi" because it booted into a version of Python, and Raspberry because "There's a lot of fruit-named computer companies, and the 'blowing a raspberry' thing was also deliberate."
It's gone on to become the world's third best-selling general-purpose computer.
At this time Upton was working as a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom, and realized he had the skills to try to halt this drift away from computers that encouraged users to code.
Upton describes the Raspberry Pi as "a very conscious attempt" to bring back the easily programmable home computers that he remembered as a child in the 1980s -- and he was gratified at its success. "Even early on you started to see those pictures of kids lying on the living room floor, looking up at the TV with Raspberry Pi plugged into it, the same way we used to."
It was named "Pi" because it booted into a version of Python, and Raspberry because "There's a lot of fruit-named computer companies, and the 'blowing a raspberry' thing was also deliberate."
It's gone on to become the world's third best-selling general-purpose computer.
Honestly... that's the most trivial and childish possible use, probably the only one that matters to you, agreed. In the world of things that matter to ADULTS however, https://pi-hole.net/ is actually pretty useful. YMMV, child.
I like the price-point and the processor speed, but when there's current issues--even driving optocouplers, it takes the fun away from it. Adruinos are hearty. I think that I have only ever blown a single pin, on any of the ones I have, in years of use. I am not so sure why they don't put more RAM on them, either.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
There's only one use of a Raspberry Pi that matters...
https://www.thegeekpub.com/450...
Agreed, and that dude has several fantastic cabinets. I could only dream of owning his tools.
My other favorite rapi project is the magic mirror people are doing. I want one but again not tools!
Calling it a "home computer" always bothered me a little, as while the Raspberry Pi has it's uses, it really doesn't look or feel anything like the home computer of yesterday. You don't really have much low level hardware access on the thing outside of the GPIOs (which were not even a goal of the initial design), it doesn't instantly boot, it doesn't give you an instant programming environment like BASIC did and it runs painfully slow compared to a regular old PC. So it's really just a regular old Linux running on slow hardware and not a very stable one at that (e.g. hot plugging USB devices crashes the device).
For learning hardware I find Arduino's far more useful and for learning software I much rather have a real PC than using a slow and bugged RaspberryPi. Of course when you already know hardware and software well, you can take a RaspberryPi and build a TV box or a emulator out of it, but as a learning device the RaspberryPi always felt very ill suited to me.
Honestly... that's the most trivial and childish possible use, probably the only one that matters to you, agreed. In the world of things that matter to ADULTS however
I'd hate to live your miserable life.
And it always has been.
As teenagers in the 70s my brother and I drooled over the S100 Z-80-based computers but couldn't come up with the minimum $2000 or so to play
The early Apple ][s in 1977 at around $1200 or so started to be affordable, and were built to tinker with.
The Commodore C64 in the 1980s at under $200 was a huge deal.
Nobody was going to risk blowing up a $3000 Mac tinkering with it
At $30, the rPi takes us back to Commodore C64 times. If you brick it, no big deal. I'm not at all surprised it's as popular as it is.
One of the nice things about the Raspberry Pi is that it's immune to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities because it uses the ARM Cortex-A53 processor.
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/
Of course, it's not the only company producing computers based on the ARM Cortex-A53. Pine64 is another example. But these sorts of computers seem to be the best option for secure computing that's current available.
I think the secret to the success of the Pi has been the fact that its an appealing platform for messing around with all kinds of things.
I don't think it would have taken off as well if it had only been useful as a kids toy or educational learning tool.
But by creating a generally useful cheap linux capable machine, they created a whole market segment with enough demand to drive the product forward. The original goals are almost a side effect at this point.
Speakers don't go on the sides of an arcade cabinet. That guy is an idiot.
It wasn't the lack of computers that stopped me programming. Back in the days of dial up I used to run websites like a rancher runs horses. I got all the way up to having a dedicated server and the ad dollars paid the expenses. I'd sit in my room for 12 hours a day smashing away at PHP HTML CSS and MySQL but my mother always hated it. She didn't want me becoming a compsci Gollum and used to badger me constantly about going outside and talking to friends.
She could not relate to me when I protested "all my friends are here" and see the multiple conversations I was having over icq, msn and yahoo chat. I told her this is the future. I will make money from this eventually. My dad worked on IBM mainframes before I was born and they had gotten divorced some 6 years earlier. "I'm not having you turn out like you're dad" she said.
Eventually I can home from school one day to find my computer packed up and gone. All my files, my passwords, my scripts, gone. This was a couple of years worth of learning and reference material that I had created for myself. She wouldn't let me anywhere near a computer for the rest of the year. "You have to focus on your studies" she said.
Initially I would turn to the back of my maths book and handwrite bits of PHP for plans I had. Algebra and derivative functions were so simple when I had already figured out how to use variables and functions. I would stand in the shower at 6am in the morning thinking about what I would code today if could. But my mind became duller as the withdrawn access increased in duration. I lost interest in maths because no longer did I have a way to apply it.
By the end of school I failed everything, having switched to a liberal arts based course in line with what my mother thought was good education. Somehow knowledge of michaelangelos David and the history and architecture of Hadrian's wall were supposed to give me a job. I haven't gone as far as to reassign my gender, but working in a supermarket for 12 hours per day is really making me think about chopping off my penis.
Back at the turn of the century ( man that still sounds weird) we had mini ITX , ya they were small, but not as small as a pi, and required a small pc power supply, now we have something smaller, faster, powered by a wallwart that does what most tinkerers want do, for 10 quid ! (/for a zero) fuck me they were packaging the zero in magazines!! And some people still find a way to bitch about them :(
Find creimer a girlfriend for 2019.
People drive cars and don't know how the engine works. It's a shame but that is how it is.
But at least with the Raspberry Pi, there is a low cost option to learn what is under the computing bonnet.
Fuck you for shilling your APK hosts-editor ripoff here. You don't need a goddamn pi to do that.
Do not need a computer to program.
Are you going to try to punish everyone with being a programmer?
Fucking programming retards.
ps. digital is gay
I see it in this article
> Matters were further complicated by supply-chain considerations, as well as excise and manufacturing costs, which forced the foundation to get the board built in China.
> Under the deal, Farnell and RS Components take care of the manufacture and distribution of Pi boards, subcontracting the manufacturing out to a third party — initially out of a factory in China, but since late 2012 from a Sony factory in South Wales in the UK.
implying that manufacturing in China is bad, there is no need to name the Chinese factory produced that batch, but mentioning Sony is somehow ok.
> "I remember taking a Raspberry Pi out of the top, these boxes of 50 stacked up on the pallet," says.
> "Taking one out of the top box, I took it into [foundation founder] Jack Lang's living room, plugged it into his telly, and it worked. We went right down to the bottom of the pallet, to a random one in the middle, in case they put the ones that worked up at the top.
You sound like a great candidate, all you do is fawn over him. #2019 sorted
Without easy answers found on the Internet, the R-pi wouldn't be as useful.
"The dominant computers -- games consoles and later tablets and smartphones -- no longer offered an invitation to create, but rather to consume."
You may generalize this to include the whole field of modern technology. -- Netfllix, games, iTunes, Play Store, etc etc etc. Consume, consume, consume!
What a marvel the Commodore64 was! Complete schematics and disassembly of firmware was readily available. And it wasn't hot glued shut with industrial epoxy.
He's my man crush. So what!? You judging me? I'm a creimersexual. So will you be once you get to know him.
Here's some info from the manual:
"The Visible Computer: 6502 Machine Language Teaching System combines
this manual with a 6502 simulator program to provide a systematic way
to learn machine language programming on Apple II computers.
The Visible Computer is a program that teaches programming. The title
is a takeoff on those transparent plastic models of men that once (and
maybe still do) populated sixth grade classrooms. Like The Visible
Man, The Visible Computer lets you see into a place not normally
accessible to the eye. Places like chest cavities and accumulators,
address latches and pancrei. Unlike The Visible Man, TVC requires no
assembly, no careful painting, and no smelly airplane glue."
TVC was a powerful combination of text, graphics and a kind of animation that showed things like registers changing as a program was executed. You could slow or even step thru a program and watch all elements moving around. At its fastest, the emulated program was still very slow in the early Apple computer, but the important thing was seeing it in action and really understanding what's under the hood. Simple to look at, elegant in execution. A version was available for Commodore 64, both by Charles Anderson.
This concept could be done today for modern computers if someone cared enough about coding education. You can see the 1982 manual here: https://archive.org/details/Th...
...omphaloskepsis often...
FTA
Just as a BBC Micro boots into BASIC, this would boot into a version of Python, says Upton, explaining that this was the origin of the name, Pi.
Actually, it boots into a BASH prompt after authentication. Perhaps it should have been named the Raspberry BASH.
The most important thing in life is to be happy and have fun. You go on throwing away your time on your "real" problems in never-ending, futile and insecure pursuit of "greatness"; you will miss out on your entire life. After you die, regardless of who you are or what you do, you will be totally forgotten within a century.
Me? I'll be too busy having fun until the moment I die.
Anyone here remember Soekris boards? There have always been single board computers and test setups. Price may have varied from time to time, but they've pretty much always been available.
Eben Upton Remembers The Years Before the First Raspberry Pi
Even I remember the first years before the Rasberry Pi. Wakka wakka!
-beau
I understand that one of the aims of the RPI was to engage kids with programming. But has this actually happened?
I don't know of any studies that show this, beyond annecdotes such as Eben's. And (annecdotally) I do know of a lot of schools that have cupboards full of cheap credit card size computers that were completely inappropriate for teaching computing to kids in schools. Especially when said schools already had computers that could run more than four browser tabs at a time.
I also see a lot of people hacking these things for their own hobbies. But can we justify this educational angle?
But $35 vs. $100 is not a meaningful comparison; a minimal RPi kit costs about $70
Not necessarily. This device is specially intended for geeks, and wanna be geeks. /.ers and their kids)
(i.e.: for
People with usually lots of junk laying around.
(with enclosure,
Cool to have one, but not necessary. If you're careful enough (try to avoid shorting pins or whatever) you could begin using your Pi without one.
And then any non conductive box (including random cardboad and plastic box) could serve as a good enough make-shift case in most situations.
(Been there, done that with my first Pi)
power supply,
The most common power supply that you are (or at least: "...were...", back when the Pi launched) going to have laying around at home is a micro-USB charger. Virtually anything uses them (smartphone, rechargeable gadgets, powerbanks, etc.)
So that's why the RPi went for a micro-USB connector instead of a barrel like some are complaining :
because in a pinch you can grab whatever you have around and plug the Pi and at least boot it
(even though you might not provide enough watts for the full 1-point-something GHz speeds of modern RPi 2 and 3 to be available, and might end up throttling down to base 600Mhz with "Undervolt" warnings. But you can still get some (albeit slow) work out of it)
Now with the industry shift from micro USB to USB-C, raspberry pi are probably going to shift to USB-C at some point in the future (Pi 4 ?) because now that's the one you'll end up having around.
and an sd card that can handle lots of small files),
everybody has tons of SD cards laying around given that's the format used by pretty much everything (smartphone, photo camera, portable gaming console, etc.)
again you could grab one laying around.
Whether it will handle the abuses of running an OS is a different matter (that's probably what you meant with 'that can handle...') or if it will die soon is a different matter.
But that won't stop you from experimenting
and that's still without keyboard, mouse, and hdmi cable.
which are exactly of the type (USB HID devices) that you'll have around.
TL;DR: the type of people who are likely interested to experiment with a Pi have a high change of having hte (extremely standard) accessories laying around, and can progressively buy more adapted (e.g.: 3A power supply, SD card with ECC, etc.) at a later point in time.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Psion PDAs had a built-in programming language, with which anyone, even kids, could write any app, from tiny little tools they wanted, to full-scale retail applications.
In 1998 Psion's PDA platform turned into Symbian, the Phone OS of choice for most of the 2000's - BUT the muppets from Nokia who ran Symbian decided at once to drop the programming language.
There could, should have been an easy-to-use programming language built as standard into every single phone, in every adult and child's pocket. (And little need for any Raspberry Pi.)
Certainly not the first nor the most powerful of its kind, but among the most popular. I didn't think much about this until I saw Raspberry Pi 3's sitting on the shelf at Target a few weeks ago.
I still have my first gen that I used for many years as an SSH tunnel, Mumble server and LAMP development server. I could just leave it running 24/7 at home and it barely sips any power.
Nowadays I have it mounted to a clipboard with a breakout and some breadboards to try to encourage interest in programming and electronics for my children... back to the roots of what these things were originally conceived to be.
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Innovation is happening in the arcade scene still?
You guys are just rebuilding the same shit real engineers built decades ago.