Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80

Posted Jun 27, 2013 11:14 UTC (Thu) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: Raspberry Pi vs TRS-80 by malor
Parent article: Trying out the Raspberry Pi

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.

to post comments

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.