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0 pointshoistbypetard8mo ago0 comments

> No, give me a new "hobbyist" computer in the spirit of those days. Throw an ARM m-series/RISC-V/etc on it with some custom blitter/vdpu and sound ASICs and 512MB of RAM. Give it some easily accessible programming environment on ROM, with an option to baremetal with ASM, C, etc. Add a few slots that are MMAPed in. And let the hobbyist field run wild.

Isn't a pi awfully close to that, at least in spirit? For my 10 year-old's science project, I bought a trio of interesting sensors off amazon, showed her a diagram of the GPIO pins and a diagram of the sensor pins, explained how to map between the two, and had her draw it out with colored pencils.

Then I burned a fresh raspbian image onto a sd card, connected a keyboard, mouse, and tv, and helped her figure out how to read the GPIO pins in python. The vibe of the whole thing felt a lot like the old things we had in the 80s and early 90s, but more accessible because I didn't have to deal with weird serial/parallel junk or with putting together a PCB for the slots.

It does sound like this crew harbors ambitions of moving past nostalgia to embracing that spirit a little more, but I don't personally feel like that's lacking in the Pi ecosystem, at least...

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taylodl8mo ago

> The vibe of the whole thing felt a lot like the old things we had in the 80s and early 90s

Except back then you were doing all the discovering and figuring stuff out without any help from your parents. At least that's the way it was in my circle of friends. When a 10-year-old is able to do everything you did without any assistance from an adult, then we'll have the spirit of the Commodore 64.

hoistbypetardOP8mo ago

I appreciate that. I would add that she might be able to do everything I did (with my 8-bit micro when I was 10) with the pi I set her up with. The thing I was impressed with about the pi was how little I had to help her interface with sensors that touched the real world, like light sensors and temperature sensors. The GPIO there is much more accessible to her than the user port on the C64 or the expansion slots on the Apples were to me.

I had to help find the references and explain some of them to her, but I've been pleased with how little help it's required from me. Probably only a little more help than I needed to learn how to connect cables and format a floppy before I ran off on my own as a kid. But she's getting more independence at the end of my help than I got with the hardware of my day.

deaddodo8mo ago

It’s similar on the hobbyist interest side, sure. But generally gathers more from the hardware hobbyists than software. This is because the Broadcom SoC is somewhat awful to do bare metal on (mostly due to anything beyond a framebuffer being mostly locked off), so you’re limited to using Linux for full capabilities.

Nothing wrong with that, but definitely a different environment than something like BASIC as your bootrom, or direct hardware poking you’d get from the old hobbyist machines.

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