The Raspberry Pi people have my full support. Certainly I would like children to have the same free access to their computers that the Sinclair Spectrum/BBC Micro generation had and this is normally not the case even if they have a PC of their own. But while the $25 price tag is a necessary condition, I am not sure that it is a sufficient one.
In my talks about the OLPC and related projects, I like to point out that we had three interesting computing communities in the 1970s with a shared language, a shared platform and some communication system. The AI researchers had Lisp, their PDP-10 and the Arpanet. The Unix guys had C, their PDP-11 and VAX machines with Unix itself and the UUNET. The microcomputer people had Basic, their personal computers and magazines. It is interesting to me how much the limitations of the micro people actually led to an extra level of learning. You could get some program over the Arpanet or UUNET and install it in your machine without looking at it, but while typing something in from a magazine listing you would get some impression of it even if you didn't pay much attention. Of course, not all Lisps or Basics were the same so often you get to figure out how to change stuff to work in the system you had. I don't think having Debian on the Raspberry Pi machine will get us the same results. At the very least it would be interesting to have a programming language closer to the surface (the scripting pane in the Frank descriptions of the latest Steps report would be an option I would be happy to see). On the hardware side, having to do everything through USB adds a level of complexity that is a real problem. I know some people feel the best way to handle this would be to add something like the Arduino, but access to a simple parallel port on the main machine would be nice. -- Jecel _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
