I've written before that I consider myself a hanger-on to the first home-computing revolution, a revolution which swept across the United States of America in the early 1980s and eventually spilled over to our shores in the late 1980s when pre-owned, refurbished and/or cobbled together remnants of the first personal computers were dumped here. You could see tons of these machines piled on top of each other in every other store in Greenhills. Somehow I got my hands on a pre-owned Commodore 64-- the C64, as it came to be known. It looked like a breadbox with a keyboard on top. To get it going you plug it into a television-- I had my C64 plugged into an banged up Philips portable B&W TV. And that was how I started to learn to code.
Back then when you turn on a computer, you are greeted by a solitary cursor blinking on the upper left corner of an otherwise blank screen. If you want to play a game, you have to "load" it up first and coax the game out from the void by typing a few indecipherable text on the uninviting blank screen. As crude as it was the C64 could be used both to play games and create games and other software. This, I think, made all the difference. Basic programming was made accessible to the average user. With a C64 one could learn to program if he chooses to; and if he opted not to he can still use the C64 as a game console. It was a computer and a game console in one machine. Somehow someone figured that most people are too dumb or maybe would prefer something simpler and thus the blinking cursor was masked over by a graphical user interface. The C64 and others like it thus gave way to dedicated game consoles and home computers that could be run with pointers and clicks. Self proclaimed "computer literate" users who have owned and used PCs for years have never typed a command on the terminal and probably never even knew that a terminal existed within the OS of their PCs. The chance to be intrigued, challenged and to learn programming was put out of reach of the average user.
Thus I welcome the coming of the Raspberry Pi. I've read about the US$35 (about Php 1,500.00) credit-sized computer that runs on stripped down Linux distributions and the fantastic things hackers, makers and just about every tinkerer are doing with it. And when the second generation Raspberry Pi came out last February 2015-- with a faster 900MHZ quad-core ARM Cortex-A7 CPU and a 1GB RAM, I got one as soon as it was available here in the Philippines.
The Raspberry Pi 2 features three upgrades-- it replaces the single-core, 700MHZ ARM11 processor; it doubles the available RAM; and it packs four full USB ports, twice the number of the original. It also now have a jack for combined 3.5mm audio and composite video. But, I think what tinkerers will highly appreciate is the 40 GPIO pins (the original only had 24), CSI and DSI connectors for direct connections to expansion boards, displays and more. Collectively, the upgrades give the Raspberry Pi 2 a speed boost and almost doubles the fun of connecting to it whatever a tinkerer could imagine.
As soon as I got my Raspberry Pi, I loaded it up with the recommended Linux-based Raspbian OS. I must say that the installer is well laid-out and will get you up and running in no time. I opted to boot up sans the LXDE graphical desktop and as the Raspbian OS finished its booting sequence, I looked up at the screen and saw an old friend-- the blinking cursor.
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