It's interesting how he talks about the raspberry pi:<p>> The first was listening to Eben Upton, the brains behind the Raspberry Pi, describe that the number of qualified applicants to study computer science is dropping. Rather than learning how computers work at a more fundamental level, students are applying only with knowledge of webpage construction and high-level scripting languages. He argued that this is emblematic of a larger generational problem and the Raspberry Pi was his solution.<p>>> “Our idea was to build something cheap, powerful and available for children’s bedrooms so they could have the same experience we had.”<p>My impression of the Pi is that it's too complex for this sort of application. It's cheap and therefore easy to procure, but it runs a desktop operating system that is arguably more difficult to work with than the one on your regular desktop PC, and it has a weird architecture consisting of a CPU as a coprocessor of a proprietary GPU, with an inscrutable binary blob managing everything underneath. That's just too much to deal with if you're aiming for the 80s bedroom computing experience. I think there's still room for something that fills that niche. A modern "Commodore 64" needs to provide the same unfettered access to the internals, with similar simplicity, but with modern performance and amenities (better editors, better languages, built-in documentation, flexible communications and control options, etc).
Isn't this more like "Lego" for hardware?<p>In MacPaint I can paint anything. In your toolbox I can only assemble something with the parts that you give me.<p>The MacPaint analogy would hold water if you'd let me draw <i>any</i> shape that I want (to be 3d printed), and merely assist by enforcing the basic constraints required for my device to be manufactured and functional (e.g. enough space to put the electronics in, etc.).
I think whats needed is a revival of the Denshi Blocks paradigm, but with a lot of rPi, 3d-printing, eurorack-modular-synth, and a whole lot of open source mixed in:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gakken_EX-System" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gakken_EX-System</a><p>Imagine a new attempt at making something similar in the modern era ..
> Retro-computing is a weird hobby of mine.<p>I hate to criticize the very first sentence, but I want retro-computing to be mainstream, and calling it "weird" seems to cover for the author's lack of confidence in his hobby. I'm trying to find a rationale for calling one's own hobby weird--I can't find one.<p>I have technical hobbies--resurrecting a Lisp Machine, collecting 80s and earlier computer keyboards, duplicating websites in Emacs--that I call "hobbies", not "weird hobbies".<p>Related examples (especially to my "covers for lack of self-confidence" point):
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1mspk9/reddit_what_is_a_common_hobby_that_you_just_dont/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1mspk9/reddit_wh...</a><p><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/1e6pzh/rteenagers_what_are_your_weird_hobbies/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/teenagers/comments/1e6pzh/rteenager...</a>