PyCon: Eben Upton on the Raspberry Pi

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.