DaveH
Striker
Created by David Braben, who us old geeks will remember as one 1 half of the team that wrote Elite back in the early 80's on the BBC computer.
Which may be why the new Pi has models A and B
/Geek mode off
That was my first thought when I heard about these a while back. Cambridge, ARM based, Model A and B. There is a small part of me thinking about the good old days - which is what this is about.
I'm going to buy one. I don't know what for yet. I'd be interested in playing with one as a desktop just to see how well it performs. I do a bit of wildlife watching with a webcam and motion detection software. Currently I use a single old laptop, but this could be a good alternative.
In time, you will probably get cases, but the point of this project is to give someone the raw building blocks to let their imagination run wild. It is about computers not being a plug-in-box any more and to bring out that inventiveness again. I found some plastic 3.5" floppy disc boxes the other day that I didn't throw out wondering if they would be useful for anything. You could easily mount one in there. How about a fag packet? As a more practical application than just a silly case, these would be ideal for things like home energy monitoring systems.
I see what the creator is saying. I did a degree in computer science in 1995. Everyone on the course had done programming at home and had played with electronics and hardware to some extent. Pissing about time in the labs was spent doing various programming bits. I took an internet chat package (NUTS) and practically rewrote half of it myself. The main purpose was to chat to my mates at other Universities. The result was I learned C and a hell of a lot about text processing, networking and sockets.
I then went on to work in the same CS department and as the web had exploded by then, students spent their time web surfing. We found students would arrive who had never wrote a program before and would leave never having written anything outside the course labs. At times I feel like I'm the last generation of hardcore geek types.
Hopefully devices like this will bring some of that back to the next generations.