I’ve always been fascinated with computer technology. I’ve owned a computer since 1978 when I bought my Apple II. I still can’t believe I paid $2500 for a computer with 24K of memory, and two 100k hard drives. That was without a monitor. You didn’t really need one because you could hook it up to your TV. That little computer taught me a lot. It wasn’t long before I bought a modem and learned that I could set it up so people could dial into the Apple and use it to form a community that posted stories, opinions and sent and received e-mail. In those days before the Internet it was all about calling into local systems to communicate with other locals who were also into computers.
I’ve owned a lot of different computers over the years. I’ve owned Apples. Amigas, and what we used to call IBM Clones, or just a PC today. I’ve always enjoyed the process of learning new stuff and expanding my skills. The old Apple could only type in upper case. So one of the first “hardware hacks” I did was replacing some chips on the motherboard and then running some extra wires between other chips to give the Apple the ability to type in lower case. I think that came in a kit that I ordered through an ad in a magazine. Later I learned how to add memory to my Amiga and install a hard drive on my IBM clone. Before long I was building computers from parts.
People who are not computer pros are sometimes impressed with my level of knowledge and skill. But that ‘s only because they don’t see the 35 years of trial and error and all the failures that have taught me what I know today.
I was lucky to be able to afford that first computer when it came out because that is what got me started. But not everyone has that happy circumstance. That’s why I’m excited about the Raspberry Pi project.
Raspberry Pi is a startup company putting out a really small (think a deck of playing cards)$25 computer. This computer has 128 megs of memory, connects to your TV for a monitor and will use a SD card (like your camera uses to store images) for its hard drive. It will run one of the free versions of Linux for its operating system. The upgraded version is $35 and comes with a network plug and 256 megs of memory.
Just compare that for a minute with the Apple II from 35 years ago. It costs 1/100th of what I paid for my first computer and has 500 times the memory. If you bought a modest 8 Gig SD card for it for $8, you would have 4,000 times more storage than I had on my two old floppy drives. On the website, the Raspberry Pi is shown playing Doom and running video playback, so it is much more capable than my old Apple.
The Raspberry Pi Company hopes to make enough money to stay in business of course. But its real goal is to keep these bare bones computers a cheap as possible. They hope that schools will be able to afford them so that a school can set up a computer learning center to teach computer literacy and programming without spending a ton of money. They hope that people without a lot of resources can get one of these, hook up a cheap keyboard and hook it to their TV to play around with programming. They hope it is a gateway and a starting point for people to who are interested, but can’t afford to go down to Wal-Mart and plunk down $400 for a computer.
Even though the basic price does not include everything you need, it is still an incredible deal. If you bought the basic unit for $25, you could have it up and running on your TV for less than another $25. Especially if you got the keyboard and other stuff from Goodwill. A school could get a whole computer with a new monitor, keyboard and everything for less than $200 a station if they wanted to go all out on it.
I’m excited to see a company providing a low dollar pathway to learning more about technology. And I’m excited to get my hands on one of these and see what kind of project I can build. I think it may take over for the computer I built to update the weather web page. I’ll bet the Raspberry Pi could do the same job with a lot less power use and I would learn some new stuff doing it that way.