Trying out the Raspberry Pi

By Jake Edge
June 19, 2013

The Raspberry Pi has clearly made a splash since its debut as a consumer product in April 2012. Thanks to the generosity of the Python Software Foundation, all of the attendees at this year's PyCon were given one of the diminutive ARM computers; a giveaway that was announced just prior to Raspberry Pi founder Eben Upton's keynote. While it has taken a bit to find time to give it a try—conference season is upon us—that has finally come to pass.

Background

For anyone living under a rock (or, perhaps, just largely uninterested in such things), the Raspberry Pi—often abbreviated "RPi"—is a credit-card-sized Linux computer that is targeted at children. While it may have been envisioned as an educational tool to teach kids about computers and programming, there seem to be plenty of adults "playing" with the RPi as well. It has modest hardware (a 700MHz ARM11 core with 512M of RAM for the Model B) by today's—even yesterday's—standards, but it is vastly more powerful than the 8-bit microcomputers that served as something of a role model in its design.

The original price tag was meant to be $25, but that couldn't quite be met, so the Model B (which was the first shipped), was priced at $35. Eventually, the Model A (without on-board Ethernet) did hit the $25 price point. In either case, it is a low-cost device that is meant to be affordable to students (or their parents) in both the developed and developing world. It requires a monitor (either composite video or HDMI) and a USB keyboard and mouse, which will add to the cost somewhat, but, at least in some areas, cast-off televisions and input devices may not be all that hard to find. Given its size, an RPi can be easily transported between home and a computer lab at school as well.

The goal is to give students a platform on which they can easily begin programming without having to install any software or do much in the way of configuration; turn it on and start hacking. Because of the price, an interested child could have their own RPi, rather than vying for time on a shared computer at school or at home. That at least is the vision that the project started with, but its reach quickly outgrew that vision as it has been adopted by many in the "maker" community and beyond.

The "Pi" in the name stands for Python (despite the spelling), which is one of the primary programming environments installed on the device. But that's not all. The Raspbian distribution that came on an SD card with the PyCon RPi also comes with the Scratch visual programming environment and the Smalltalk-based Squeak (which is used to implement Scratch). As its name would imply, Raspbian is based on Debian (7.0 aka "Wheezy"). It uses the resource-friendly LXDE desktop environment and provides the Midori browser, a terminal program, a local Debian reference manual, the IDLE Python IDE (for both Python 2.7.3 and 3.2.3), and some Python games as launcher icons on the desktop.

Firing it up

Starting up the RPi is straightforward: hook up the monitor, keyboard, and mouse, insert the SD card, and apply power. Using three of the general purpose I/O (GPIO) pins on the device will provide a USB serial console, but it isn't generally needed. Once it boots, logging in as "root" (with no password) for the first time will land in the raspi-config tool. Or you can log in as "pi" with password "raspberry" to get to the command line.

The configuration tool allows changing settings for the device, such as the time zone, "pi" user password, starting up X at boot, enabling sshd (set a root password first), and changing the memory split between Linux and the GPU. From the command line, though, the venerable startx command will bring up the LXDE environment. One note: when using an HDMI to VGA converter some tweaking to the video mode may be required.

It should come as no surprise that, once configured, the system behaves like a normal Debian system. The initial "apt-get upgrade" took quite some time, as there were lots of packages to pick up, but subsequent upgrades have been quick. It is entirely suitable for its intended purpose, but can be expanded with the packages available from the Raspbian (and other) repositories.

NOOBS

Of course there are other distribution choices to run on the RPi. In early June, the Raspberry Pi Foundation (the organization behind the device) announced the "New Out Of Box Software" (NOOBS) installer that makes it much easier to get started. The NOOBS zip file needs to be downloaded and unpacked onto a 4G or larger SD card, but once that's done, multiple distributions can be installed without needing network access or requiring special imaging software to put a boot image onto the card.

NOOBS acts like a recovery image, in that it will prompt to install one of several distributions on first boot, but it is always available by holding down the shift key when booting. You can overwrite the existing distribution on the card to recover from a corrupted installation or to switch to one of the others. In addition, it has a tool to edit the config.txt system configuration file for the currently installed distribution or to open a browser to get help right from NOOBS.

Using NOOBS is meant to be easy, and it was—once I could get it to boot. My choice of using a VGA monitor (thus an HDMI to VGA converter) meant that I needed a development version of NOOBS and the config.txt from Raspbian.

NOOBS provides images for several different distributions: Arch Linux ARM, OpenELEC, Pidora, Raspbian (which is recommended), RaspBMC, and RISC OS. OpenELEC and RaspBMC are both XBMC-based media-centric distributions, while Arch Linux ARM, Raspbian, and Pidora are derived from their siblings in the desktop/server distribution world. RISC OS is the original operating system for Acorn computers that used the first ARM processors. It is a proprietary operating system (with source) that is made available free of charge for RPi users.

Installing Pidora using NOOBS was simple, though it took some time for NOOBS to copy the distribution image to a separate SD card partition. Pidora seems to use the video mode information from the NOOBS config.txt as there were no problems on that score. Using startx appears to default to GNOME (which is not even installed), so the desktop wouldn't start up; switching the default desktop to Xfce in /etc/sysconfig/desktop may be required. Once installed, booting gives a choice of NOOBS (by holding down the shift key) or Pidora (or whatever other distribution is installed). It is a fully functional installation, not LiveCD-style, so there is a writable ext4 partition to store programs and other data (like the screen shot at right) or to add and update packages on the system.

There are a lot of people and projects using the RPi for various interesting things. The front page blog at the RPi home page is regularly updated with stories about things like an RPi lab in Ghana, a sailing robot using an RPi for navigation and control, and the Onion Pi, a Tor proxy running on an RPi. In his PyCon keynote, Upton listed numerous projects that have adopted the RPi for everything from music synthesizers to art installations and aerial photography from weather balloons.

The RPi is being used to research and test new technologies as well. There are plans afoot to switch from X to the Wayland display server protocol, which will make it a useful testing ground for Wayland and Weston. Beyond that, the foundation has been helping to fund PyPy, the Python interpreter written in Python as a way to improve the performance of that language on the device.

It seems that some combination of capabilities, community, and, perhaps, marketing have led to the RPi's popularity. The focus on providing a platform to learn programming that was portable and easy to use has widened far beyond that niche. It has resulted in an ecosystem of companies that are selling accessories for the RPi (including things like cases, add-ons for controlling other devices using the GPIO pins, sensors, and so on). But it is probably the "fun" aspect that is the biggest push behind much of the RPi's momentum—the system really does hearken back to the days of TRS-80s and other 8-bit computers, but with color, sound, video, and a lot more power.

Others

Posted Jun 20, 2013 7:42 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (7 responses)

I was about to order an RPi but was advised to look around first. There are lots of similar projects, each a little different. Mele, Beagle, Wandboard, Hackberry -- the list goes on. I ended up with a Wandboard, for $100, plus $10 for a nice box and $8 for a 5V 10W 2.1mm-plug power supply. It costs more up front than a RPi, but it has more stuff built in (bluetooth, wifi, S/PDIF audio, 2 microSD slots, expansion header) so it doesn't need a lot of USB dongles, and has a much faster processor.

There are gotchas: many ARM system chips have NDAed docs, so various features are unavailable to you and me. This has particularly been a problem with integrated GPUs. Some are being reverse-engineered, a few are due to have docs released "soon", most will only ever have a binary-blob driver that only works with a particular kernel version.

I bought a Sandisk "Extreme Pro" (i.e., expensive) microSD to boot from, which claimed "up to 90 MB/s" write speed. Copying a boot image onto it, I got 11 MB/s.

Others

Posted Jun 20, 2013 18:04 UTC (Thu) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Sorry, that's a "5.5mm/2.1mm" power plug.

Others

Posted Jun 20, 2013 18:18 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

the difference between $35 and $100 is pretty significant, you better get a few extras for almost triple the cost.

As for SD speed, remember that both the writer and the card have to implement the high speed modes before you will see those speeds. I have a just released $2K DSLR that won't do more than 40MB/s, even with the super expensive cards.

> ..only ever have a binary-blob driver that only works with a particular kernel version.

This is just incorrect.

The kernel side of the interface is completely open and has no binary blobs. As a result, that firmware can be used with new kernels without any problem.

The firmware itself is a binary blob, but that is true of every video card that I know of. There are expected to be new firmware blobs that implement new features, and using those new features may require kernel modifications, but that's no surprise. Just don't change the firmware if you don't want the new features.

Others

Posted Jun 21, 2013 20:41 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (4 responses)

This is just incorrect.

Firmware blobs are a whole other topic.

We're all familiar with Nvidia's binary driver that only works with certain kernel builds, and the reverse-engineered and Free but still limited driver Nouveau. The embedded GPU world is all like that, except that Nouveau-analogs are rare, and fully supported drivers nonexistent.

Others

Posted Jun 21, 2013 21:00 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

the Pi does not use any binary drivers.

There are people who are unhappy with the Video drivers that the Pi uses because they are little more than a shim layer (the Video Firmware implements just about all the functions, so the functions in the driver just call into the firmware)

So unless you are talking about the firmware, there is nothing that you can interpret to be "binary-blob driver that only works with a particular kernel version" in the Pi. There are such things in most other ARM systems.

So I was wrong in that I was replying to something slightly different from what you said originally, but your post left the impression that the Pi suffered from the same problem, and that is what I was replying to.

Others

Posted Jun 23, 2013 2:19 UTC (Sun) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (1 responses)

I was writing about the universe of little ARMs, not Pi in particular.

There's a reverse-engineering effort "LIMA" for MALI, and "Etnaviv" for the Vivante GC2000 used on the Wandboard. (Earlier Vivantes were well documented, and there have been rumblings about a GC2000 doc release soon.) The PowerVR found in the TI chips on most boards remains a big problem. The situation with the Broadcom "VideoCore" found on the Pi seems to be more complicated than suggested, with the API to the firmware blob itself still undocumented.

The relative prices matter if you mean to use them in volume production. For personal use, it's the absolute difference that matters. The absolute difference ($wb - $pi) for a system is negative if you actually need the various peripherals, and would need to buy USB dongles and a USB hub to plug them into. There are real advantages to having them in one little box.

Others

Posted Jul 12, 2013 5:34 UTC (Fri) by laanwj (guest, #42789) [Link]

Etnaviv is indeed the reverse engineering project for the gcXXX Vivante 3D chips. I've recently started on a Mesa driver (https://github.com/laanwj/mesa), which has basic functionality now.

However, earlier Vivantes (such as gc600, gc800) were not documented all, at least not open source. I had to reverse engineer all the working of the 3D pipe myself. The only part remotely documented in the wild is the 2D core (through the gcx project).

What makes you say that earlier Vivantes were well documented?

Others

Posted Jun 23, 2013 17:11 UTC (Sun) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

The Raspberry Pi runs entirely proprietary software, although you can run Linux-based firmware on the embedded ARM microcontroller. :-)

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 20, 2013 11:16 UTC (Thu) by stevan (guest, #4342) [Link] (1 responses)

"It seems that some combination of capabilities, community, and, perhaps, marketing have led to the RPi's popularity."

The price must also be a factor in its popularity, though. While most tech-related web sites etc, have the usual "I bought a $ALTERNATIVE because of $PERCEIVED_SHORTCOMING" the reality is that the Pi has made tinkering respectable again, and that it's reaching areas where a more expensive option would become harder to justify. That sweet spot is clearly untapped.

Somehow, as stated, "the system really does hearken back to the days..."

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 20, 2013 11:56 UTC (Thu) by dgm (subscriber, #49227) [Link]

Indeed. I have do one, and a few people I know also do. And the reason is not community or marketing. It's because
1. it's dirty cheap
2. it's easy to find
3. it's easy to tinker with
That last point is key. I only needed a usb keyboard and mouse (which I already had), an SD card (which I also had) and a TV (duh) and I was ready to go. Download Raspian, boot the think and you're hacking.

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 20, 2013 23:02 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

minor correction

> The original price tag was meant to be $25, but that couldn't quite be met

The $25 price tag was always for the version without the Ethernet. They produced the model B (at $35) first because of the huge demand for it.

They also originally produced it with 256M of RAM, but were able to increase the RAM on the model B to 512M without increasing the price. (the Model A has started out shipping with 256M of ram, I would not be surprised to see it increase to match the model B after they run out of the initial batch of RAM they had available)

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 20, 2013 23:58 UTC (Thu) by Tracey (guest, #30515) [Link] (6 responses)

The beagle bone black seems quite open and has decent documentation.

We picked one up at the maker fair in San Mateo when I realized that the
back orders on the board were too long to wait for.

The angstrom linux that's on it left something to be desired(at least for
me), but it runs a debian arm build quite well from the command line(video out or shh(the way I do most embedded stuff anyway)).

I,ve been following the linux cnc folks and just downloaded what looks like a cool version that should make the BBB a good controller for a 3d printer or mill. As with the debian image, it is loaded onto a micro sd card that the board has(leaving the orginal linux alone).

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 21, 2013 8:50 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] (5 responses)

The BeagleBone Black is the better device. As you would expect, as the RPi set a baseline of price and performance which a newer product couldn't but fail but to notice. What BeagleBone hasn't done is to build the same enthusiasm and community as surrounds the Pi.

Most of that is because the enthusiasm and the community is the whole point of the RPi. To criticise the RPi as being a old CPU or lacking ports or whatever is to miss the point. The RPi project isn't judged on the quality of the hardware, but on the quality of the community. It's aim was to reinvigorate computing as a hobby, and it has certainly done that.

The other point which is missed is that the RPi proved it could be done. You can produce a hobbyist CPU so cheaply that it isn't a tragedy if you let out the blue smoke. Previous boards were $150 and that was just too expensive to let kids tinker with.

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 21, 2013 17:34 UTC (Fri) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

If there were +1 buttons I would be hitting this from as many browsers as possible. Well said, well said indeed.

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 21, 2013 20:50 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

> The BeagleBone Black is the better device.

Agreed, and it's one of the few "better devices" out there that's very close to the same price point ($45 vs $35). I've got several of both.

The problem with it is that it's late to the party.

With the Pi, it got a huge amount of attention for being 1/4 or less the cost of the existing options. This got a lot of attention, and as a result, they have now shipped around 1.5 million units (and with the periodic "out of stock" issues, these are really units in people's hands, not just shipped to resellers). This, combined with the publicity has created a very large community, most of who know very little about computers, but are very enthusiastic and eager to share what they just learned.

the BB black is mostly interesting to folks who know a lot more (they need to know more before they appreciate the differences), and so they are less likely to be going out and eagerly telling people about their 'hello world' equivalent experimentation.

This makes the community around the BB black much smaller than that around the Pi, and extremely unlikely to grow to match it.

Trying out the Raspberry Pi

Posted Jun 24, 2013 11:27 UTC (Mon) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (2 responses)

One point I've made before about the Raspberry Pi initiative is that it shouldn't exclude other hardware platforms: the community shouldn't be restricted to people who have access to a specific device, but it should try and accommodate different devices and educate about the techniques involved, not how a specific product is used to do a particular thing.

Trying out alternatives

Posted Jun 24, 2013 22:55 UTC (Mon) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link] (1 responses)

In this case, uniformity is a plus: having to support multiple platforms would probably imply losing focus and spending energy on competing products. Also, having a universal platform is much better for hobbyists, since projects are compatible and can be translated from one environment to the other. Finally, there is a growing ecosystem around the RPi which would need effort to be adapted to other platforms.

Hardware is very much about little details that make things work, especially for beginners. Software is much more accommodating. [Cue mandatory analogy.] There are many lens mount standards and supporting all of them takes a lot of effort for lens makers and camera owners. In contrast, there is just one proprietary software package used by almost everyone (and just one or two libre ones).

Trying out alternatives

Posted Jun 25, 2013 16:17 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

In my other lengthy comment in the discussion I pointed out that the Raspberry Pi has been beneficial because it has given vendors of extra gadgetry something to target, and because the audience isn't the usual group of experts or professionals, the materials they have to produce are more comprehensive and generally better than those they produced before. But a lot of those vendors are part of the ecosystem and they aren't going to stop supporting Arduino, BeagleBone, or whatever other exotic boards they usually support because those are also part of their business.

So it's not a question of people inside some kind of closed community having to adapt their Raspberry Pi recipes for other boards, or at least not entirely: instead people are joining the ecosystem by adapting existing solutions to yet another board, which in this case is the Raspberry Pi. Again, they probably won't cut their ties with other solutions because they probably get good money for supporting and developing solutions using those other boards, not least because the Raspberry Pi won't be appropriate for many applications of their products.

I also mentioned the Computer Literacy programme that accompanied the widespread promotion and introduction of microcomputers in the UK in the 1980s. That largely resulted in products aimed at one system, which was good for that system, but not so beneficial for other systems (or at least not directly). As everyone discovered, as technology progressed that initial work became somewhat less interesting (although still usable through backwards compatibility and emulation), and people had to start over without so much goodwill and public money.

Supporting things as different as, say, the Arduino (Uno or even the Due) and the Raspberry Pi is likely to be a challenge, of course, but there really shouldn't be a reason why this couldn't be tackled at different levels: physical/electrical, driver or firmware, application, and so on. Keeping on top of such stuff in the Arduino world is already a pain (some boards use 3.3V, others 5V, I/O capabilities vary substantially), and when/if the next Raspberry Pi model comes around, there may well be a need to keep on top of it there as well. If people struggle and can't be bothered to update their recipes, the initiative may be in trouble over the longer term.

History already indicates that targeting a single platform does provide initial momentum, but that the momentum can dissipate as time and technology progresses. I think it's foolish to forget that.

SBC with SATA and 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports

Posted Jun 21, 2013 16:09 UTC (Fri) by przemoc (guest, #67594) [Link] (3 responses)

I noticed that I don't see RPi-like SBCs with GbE ports.

Are there any SBCs with CPU >= 1GHz, RAM >= 512MB, 2 Fast Ethernet ports (or even better GbE ones, at least one of two) and (e)SATA port? It could be nice foundation to build small low-cost low-energy router-home-server.

Well, I bought some broken Epia M700-10E on auction last year (long beep at startup, no video output, even with new and officially compatible KVR667D2N5/2G memory and different PCI video cards), but still haven't got enough time to figure out the issue. So to replace my old HP Vectra VL400 (PIII 930MHz, 256MB RAM), it may be easier to buy something that just works actually, I guess.

SBC with SATA and 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports

Posted Jun 21, 2013 17:49 UTC (Fri) by johill (subscriber, #25196) [Link] (1 responses)

Maybe something like minnowboard.org, but it only has one Ethernet port.

SBC with SATA and 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports

Posted Jun 21, 2013 20:30 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link]

Wandboard has GigE too, but also only one. However, lots of boards have headers that give access to all the useful signals, so a board with a bunch of RJ-45 sockets and GigE chips isn't a big project. Maybe you can do one yourself.

SBC with SATA and 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports

Posted Jun 23, 2013 17:20 UTC (Sun) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

The Marvell 'Kirkwood' SoC family appears to meet your specs. There's a development board (OpenRD), several 'plug computers' and consumer NAS boxes that use them. Debian's armel port supports many of these: http://www.cyrius.com/debian/kirkwood/

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 21, 2013 18:10 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (11 responses)

I don't see how this hearkens to TRS-80 and its ilk. TRS-80 was not an affordable version of something that was already very popular. It was not aimed at kids, and was very expensive. The most bare-bones TRS-80 cost $1800 in today's money.

People who buy a Raspberry Pi for fun are scratching an itch they've always had, but couldn't justify the money for it. People who bought a TRS-80 for fun were delving into a hobby that had never existed before. Businesses may have looked at 8-bit computers and said, "finally I can afford a computer to track my inventory," but I don't think hobbyists and children looked at it that way.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 21, 2013 20:55 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (10 responses)

This isn't the TRS-80 equivalent, it's the C-64 equivalent (for those in the US) or the Sinclair equivalent (for those in the UK)

Those were not 'serious' computers and were not priced as such. The Pi is FAR cheaper than they ever dreamed of being, but in relative terms, the difference between a Pi and a cheap desktop system is similar to the difference in price between a C-64 and the computer that a business would have used at that time.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 22, 2013 2:17 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (9 responses)

I wonder if you've confused the Commodore 64 with something else, because the C64 was not a supercheap affordable stripped down version of anything. It was a leading edge computer (in the personal computer industry, which was well established by that time) that happened to be less expensive than some of the competition for a variety of reasons. Its very name reflected the fact that it was probably more powerful than whatever else you were thinking about.

The Sinclair, on the other hand, (at least one model I recall) seems analogous to Raspberry Pi in that it was dramatically cheaper than similar computers by being scaled way down. Its breakthrough affordability made computers available to a new class of people (children, maybe) and for a new class of projects.

Note that the article's analogy is stronger than an analogy to any particular product introduction; it talks about the feel of the entire 8 bit microprocessor revolution. That's a pretty tough analogy to make.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 22, 2013 9:23 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (8 responses)

The C64 was originally priced at $799 (or was it $699), but dropped within months to $299 and feel further from there. My school got a bunch of them when they first came out (before the price drop)

They were cutting edge, but cutting edge home machines. They hooked to a TV because monitors were too expensive, even the floppy was an add-on that cost almost as much as the computer itself

it's cutting edge features were in sound and graphics (remember sprites?), i.e. game stuff, not in anything "serious"

the Sinclair was a couple years earlier, but also very much designed for home use.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 22, 2013 18:37 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

In UK prices, the C64 was more than twice the price of the Spectrum on introduction (£399 versus £175), and although both were introduced in their home markets at around the same time, the C64 arrived in the UK almost a year later. The pricing is important because you have people claiming that the BBC Micro was for "rich kids" (reminiscent of the Tramiel rhetoric used against the significantly more expensive Apple computers), but at £399 the BBC Model B and the C64 had the same price and were clearly in a different category to the Spectrum.

I agree with giraffedata about the analogy: the microcomputer era exhibited a range of characteristics based on the availability of affordable computers, so that businesses could deploy on a one-per-desk basis, individuals could automate tedious calculator-based tasks and experiment with programming, hobbyists and educators could even experiment with robotics and automation, and everyone could play computer games. Some computers attempted to cover all of these things but weren't particularly affordable as a result (£399 is probably in excess of £1500 in today's money, maybe more); others were more affordable (but still a few hundred quid in today's money) but necessarily stripped right down as a result.

The Raspberry Pi can take advantage of the considerable reduction in production costs and orders-of-magnitude increase in computing power to deliver something which is affordable and accessible. Whilst I think that comparisons with specific products and programmes of the 1980s are dubious (the Computer Literacy effort in the UK provided more than just some hardware) and that it is unfortunate to regard the device as "disposable", it is clear that the initiative has woken up various parts of the industry (such as those providing accessories for interfacing and automation) and will probably result in a wider availability of materials and products that will in turn encourage more people to try this stuff out.

But the point about the nature of this current initiative not being the same "revolution" is a valid one: people in the 1970s and 1980s needed convincing that they needed computers; today, people already have several of them and just need convincing that they can find out how they function. Maybe it is merely a renaissance as opposed to a revolution.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 26, 2013 19:47 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (6 responses)

I don't think any of these analogies are very good. The Pi is a thirty-five dollar computer, yet one that's nonetheless fully functional and reasonably powerful. Every prior microcomputer has been enormously more expensive, especially if you adjust for inflation. Even the C64, one of the prior bastions of cheap-and-powerful computing, came out at $600, and cost even more if you wanted a floppy disk. Per Wikipedia, that's about $1500 today. (others here are saying that it dropped to $300 fairly quickly, but that's still $750 in 2013 dollars.)

You can't really point at a Pi and say that it's like anything that preceded it. There are several similar machines that have come afterward, typically offering more power for more money. But, at the time it was invented, it was a new thing in the world, a solid machine for under $50, usable with almost any junk equipment available. It's perfectly capable of most tasks except gaming, and if Wayland keeps coming along, it might even be okay at doing that.

I suppose a weakish reverse analogy might be a text-only 6502 machine in the 1980s, running at 0.5MHz, with 32K, for $50. A computer like that would have been amazingly popular.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 26, 2013 20:07 UTC (Wed) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (5 responses)

by the way, and for what it's worth, I did a bit more digging to refresh my memory on the C64 pricing (all US prices, I recognize that the stupid practice of keeping the figures the same for retail prices in England would make it significantly more expensive there)

when it was released in 1982, the C64 was $595 (as you say, ~$1500 today), while it's close-to-equivalent competitors were >$1200.

I had said that the price quickly was cut in half, but the reality is that by the late '80s it was readily available for ~$100 in many places in the US (it was not discontinued until 1994)

But in any case, you are correct that a computer for $35 is significantly better (especially since it is able to run a time-sharing OS effectively)

But the C64 was cheap enough to be a 'kids' computer, something that you didn't have to worry about them breaking, unlike the 'family' or 'business' computer

it's this aspect that causes people to point at the c64 when talking about the Pi

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 26, 2013 23:52 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (4 responses)

Well, the C64 is probably the closest analogy, but that's just because everything else is so much further away.

The sheer wealth of applications that a Pi will run perfectly well is staggering. Realistically, you'd probably want to run only one large program at a time, so it's not as comfortable and flexible as a larger machine. But it's a whole computer for less than most games. It really is a new thing in the world; analogies just don't cover it.

Sure, there have been many many cheap electronic devices that sorta pretended to be computers, but this is the real deal, fully programmable, running a general purpose operating system, and able to run most current free software pretty well. For thirty-five dollars.

That's a big deal. It's having access to a powerful computer for lunch money. In the 1980s, I would have thought the Raspberry Pi was made by God.

In 2013, at that low price, it means that kids can fairly easily buy their own, and it could open up computing in poorer countries. It's sort of like the One Laptop Per Child, but it's something people actually want, and which will actually work for whatever they want it for.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 27, 2013 11:14 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

Well, the C64 is probably the closest analogy, but that's just because everything else is so much further away.

As someone else pointed out, you'd have to give Sinclair and a lot of other European vendors more of the credit, as well as Commodore for the VIC-20, for delivering affordable computers at the dawn of the 1980s if you wanted to choose a significant point in history and market-defining products for that point in time. However, there's nothing to stop anyone considering low-end products in the mid-1980s or at the end of the decade, or to step out of the developed world and to consider markets where a lot of the hardware ended up at costs low enough for fairly large numbers of people to buy.

That's a big deal. It's having access to a powerful computer for lunch money. In the 1980s, I would have thought the Raspberry Pi was made by God.

It's true that products of the 1980s and 1990s are difficult to find if they are to hit the £35 mark in today's money, but that's just a consequence of how technology has become cheaper and more powerful. You could easily say the same thing about mobile phones, even ones which are a few years old: pocket-sized mobile communications with colour screens was science fiction when I was a child.

But regardless of whether this is a "revolution" or has been done before - I would argue that it has been done before (many households had microcomputers in the 1980s), but it's "more of the same" rather than a revolution - the one thing I will give Raspberry Pi credit for is the way that the initiative has probably rolled back in the minds of a generation of users the idea that computers have to have certain tick-list features imposed by companies like Microsoft and Intel that has them paying several hundred dollars or pounds for a device that does basic home computing. Above all else, it has been market constraints rather than technology that has prevented such devices from reaching large numbers of developed world customers over the last decade or so.

Then again, with mobile phones becoming more sophisticated and widespread all the time, the issue is less about the one device that may or may not have broken the barrier and more about the considerable volume of technology that was waiting to break through anyway.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 27, 2013 13:49 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (2 responses)

You're driving right past my point here.... these things are cheap as potato chips, yet are fully functional computers, able to do almost all of what their more expensive siblings can. In my view, this is the important bit, but you kinda glided right past.

Sure, the Sinclairs and VIC 20s cost very little, but they were also nearly useless. They were no more than toy computers, barely capable of doing useful work, having only 1K and 5K, respectively. They were good for extremely simple games, and learning how to use a larger machine, but very little else. If you could invest a ton of time, you could maybe eke out a little computation, or perhaps I/O control, but not much.

The Pi isn't like that. You can run most modern applications on one perfectly well. Word processing, spreadsheets, page layout, web browsing, even video playback. You can do genuine development on one, using any number of different languages, all for free. You're not stuck with either crappy interpreted BASIC or pure machine code, you can use anything. And most of the source code is available for you to peruse and change, excepting the nasty firmware blob for the video driver.

It's not quite as good, not quite as comfortable, as a big machine, but it's not too far off. It's nothing at all like a Sinclair or VIC 20 in that respect; there was no way those little machines were going to run the great majority of software written for their bigger brothers. And it's not like the C64 or Apple ][ either, because it's so very, very much cheaper than they were.

That's something new in the world. There comes a time when evolution becomes revolution. Analogies to prior computer hardware really don't work well. In this case, they obscure the truth, instead of revealing it. Trying to slot this new hardware into those old mental models makes it hard to see for what it actually is.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jul 6, 2013 15:31 UTC (Sat) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, I guess I just have to disagree with this. The revolution in the late 1970s and early 1980s was as much about persuading people that they needed personal computing as it was about delivering it to them. Everybody pokes fun at statements by the leaders of IBM and DEC about how nobody needed to own their own computer as if personal computing was always obvious, but even thirty years ago many people could only see hypothetical benefits like doing their personal or business accounts and needed to be led into imagining a future that was not completely obvious to them.

I don't think anyone now really needs to be led into imagining anything about what they might get out of using a computer that is just like the others but much cheaper. Moreover, if you wanted a cheap computer there are plenty of ways to get one, like just buying one second hand, for instance. Lots of people do that, and they're often getting one in a proper case with a keyboard and screen attached as well. (There have also been full GNU/Linux netbooks available for not much more than £100 for a while, although one can always argue about how wonderful their capabilities are, but they are still genuine and complete systems.)

And as far as the capabilities of the early, inexpensive microcomputers are concerned, the fact that they delivered non-trivial computing capabilities to the individual was sufficient. Just because they didn't do digital audio and video doesn't make them toys: arguably the mere existence of the cheapest systems was enough to disrupt demand for expensive and cutting-edge systems from the likes of Xerox, ICL and other big names. And what was there to compare those systems against? Unless you had access to a system at work, you were comparing them against having no capabilities at all.

I agree that analogies to old systems break down. Again, the reason for this is technological progress and economics. Otherwise, it would have been possible to get yourself a Xerox Alto instead of a VIC-20 for a couple of hundred dollars back at the start of the 1980s.

Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jul 6, 2013 16:14 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Just because they didn't do digital audio and video doesn't make them toys: arguably the mere existence of the cheapest systems was enough to disrupt demand for expensive and cutting-edge systems from the likes of Xerox, ICL and other big names. And what was there to compare those systems against? Unless you had access to a system at work, you were comparing them against having no capabilities at all.

The reference to toys was to Timex/Sinclair and VIC-20, i.e. a class of computer that was introduced after the microcomputer revolution for the sole purpose of being affordable, sort of like some are saying about Raspberry Pi. So what people were comparing them against was existing microcomputers that they would have liked but couldn't afford: computers that had enough memory to run a bookkeeping program; computers with persistent storage; computers that could display more than a few lines of text. I suspect buyers of these dirt-cheap computers found them more recreational - or educational - than actually productive, which could earn them the toy label.