Monthly Archives: May 2012

Thoughts on the Raspberry Pi

I can remember the excitement of visiting a friend’s house in the early eighties and seeing an actual home computer. It was a ZX81, and he was typing in a program from a magazine. He was programming a home computer!

This was a feeling you might get if you popped round to your neighbours house tomorrow to check out their jetpack which could also take you to the moon.

Before that moment, computers seemed futuristic, exciting, exotic, but…unattainable. But after? It’s all I could think about.

During autumn 1982, I was devouring every computer magazine my pocket money would allow. After much heated playground discussion, I made my choice. My parents scoured the shops in December to find the object of my affection, and on Christmas Day I found myself the proud owner of a home computer – a Dragon 32.

It came with a manual which didn’t just tell you how to connect it to your television, it also detailed how your make the computer do your bidding by writing BASIC programs.

Cut to a year or so later and I’d upgraded to a BBC Model B. Devouring manuals, writing software, making simple electronics projects to interface to it. I even got a modem (top speed 1.2Kbps) and got online for the first time.

There’s a whole generation just like me. Hooked by computing devices they could truly control.

That’s why the Raspberry Pi is so exciting to me. I hope it succeeds in inspiring a generation, and I’ll certainly try to help. I ordered mine a few weeks ago.

Its low cost makes doing potentially risky projects much more palatable. Its small size and low power requirements are also interesting properties to exploit.

My Raspberry Pi hasn’t arrived yet, which harks back to the old days of “please wait 28 days for delivery”.

Just adds to the retro excitement 🙂

Well that was quite a hiatus…

Long time no post. Been very busy, just not out in the open!

A recent post on Dan Cohen’s Digital Humanities Blog inspired to dip my toe back in the water though. First was a post where he coined the word ‘Blessay‘ (though he was unaware that Stephen Fry got there first). While I don’t think I’ll be writing in the scholarly manner Dan advocates, the idea of writing longer form pieces appealed to me.

One of the reasons I wrote blog articles was to ‘give something back’. If I hit upon a solution to some interesting problem, I’d write about it. However, in the past few years StackOverflow has provided an avenue for that kind of altruism.

However, the trouble with StackOverflow is it tends to become a race to write an answer as fast as possible to garner quick upvotes. If someone posed an interesting question, I’d spend some time writing a more considered answer. While I might learn something interesting, that writing is lost among a sea of quick answers.

Until I read Dan’s post, I hadn’t realised how much I enjoyed writing longer pieces. So, I aim to do that, and get better at it!

So – the blog has a new look to focus on the text. And away we go…