| |||||||||||||
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry PiPosted Mar 21, 2013 23:23 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)In reply to: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi by pboddie Parent article: PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi
The difference between the 1980s and today is that the main application for home computers in the 1980s was fooling around. Today, the Internet is so pervasive in all aspects of modern life that a working computer is pretty much required for many serious things, including sending and receiving important e-mail, doing the taxes, schoolwork etc. Regardless of the hardware cost many people cannot afford fooling around with the »family PC« because all family members depend on it in various ways. It's great if one's family can afford more than one computer such that the kids can use one for fooling around and there is another one handy to go onto the Internet to figure out how to fix the first one if it is broken. Many people do not have that luxury. In that case a $35 Raspberry Pi is a more reasonable option than a second computer that costs several times as much even if one buys it used, and requires the same sort of peripherals (display, keyboard, mouse) as the Raspberry Pi. As far as the display requirement is concerned, one can use a Raspberry Pi with an old tube TV from the attic. It's not a lot of fun but it is better than nothing. Even if there is only one good monitor in the house one can plug it into the Raspberry Pi instead of the good PC and avoid breaking the good PC when fooling around.
(Log in to post comments)
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 13:41 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I'm not disputing the inconvenience of messing up the family computer. My point was purely that the obstacle to hardware hacking in the 1980s was not the lack of access to the hardware internals (there were plenty of robots and other things made for the education market) but the huge financial penalty incurred if one damaged the computer. What we have seen is actually a shift in the consequences from financial inconvenience (spending a few thousand dollars in today's money) to practical inconvenience (having to log into the netbank from work to pay the bills).
So no, I don't disagree with you, but I think people underestimate the investments that people were having to make back in the day, and when people look for reasons why certain things were not rampantly popular they would do well to consider the matter of how much these things actually cost in real terms. (There's also the schoolyard arguments about certain computers being expensive, others being cheap, and which features were necessary, but one has to remember that the BBC Micro had to do so much that one wonders whether the BBC were actually trying to specify a technical platform for their own purposes, which in some ways they were.)
The appliance nature of the Raspberry Pi is a positive step forward (or backward to a simpler era, if you like) and one that the involuntary "cartel" of retailers, manufacturers and Microsoft has managed to keep away from the average consumer for far too long. And yes, the price is also very nice, and it certainly will help to lower hardware acquisition costs for a lot of people even if the board itself is not the total cost of the package. Where I come from, a lot of old TVs will have either antenna or SCART inputs and to use them will require yet more extras, just like using old school monitors will require adapters for the VGA inputs.
My point is that some of the practical aspects have been downplayed with a somewhat nostalgic spin on the inconveniences everyone had to endure back in the day. There will be add-ons that mitigate this, but a bit more foresight and less of the spin would have made a more convenient product, in my opinion.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 18:34 UTC (Fri) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]
calling a Pi an 'appliance' is seriously misleading.
Appliances are single purpose devices that almost always prevent you from making any changes to the software on the device.
If you squint hard enough, you could define a Pi this way, it's single purpose is to run a general purpose, open source operating system
But by that argument, Mac computers are appliances, their single purpose is to run OS/X.
I don't think you would find many people agreeing that Mac computers are appliances, and by the same token Pi computers are not appliances.
PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi Posted Mar 22, 2013 23:17 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]
I meant appliance in the way that you switch it on and it just works. Given that the very nature of the device requires you to supply your own operating system and that you have complete control over what that is (subject to obvious technical constraints, in case anyone wants to pick apart that statement), I think it's obvious that I didn't mean appliance in the sense that only the manufacturer gets to decide how the device is used.
|
|||||||||||||