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10 years of Raspberry Pi: The $25 computer has come a long way:
This little device has revolutionized computing since it came on the scene. We take a look back at its journey.
The UK in the 1980s was ground zero for the microcomputer revolution. Cheap computers based on 8-bit processors flooded the market, teaching a generation to program using built-in BASIC interpreters. Homes had devices like Sinclair's ZX81 and Spectrum, while schools used Acorn's BBC Micro.
These weren't like today's PCs. They were designed and built to be accessible, with IO ports that could be accessed directly from the built-in programming environments. Turn one on, and you were ready to start programming.
But then things changed: 16-bit machines were more expensive, and technical and marketing failures started to remove pioneers from the market. The final nail in the coffin was the IBM PC and its myriad clones, focused on the business market and designed to run, not build, applications.
It became harder to learn computing skills, with home computers slowly replaced by gaming consoles, smartphones and tablets. How could an inquisitive child learn to code or build their own hardware?
The answer first came from the Arduino, a small ARM-based developer board that served as a target for easy-to-learn programming languages. But it wasn't a computer; you couldn't hook it up to a keyboard and screen and use it.
Eben Upton, an engineer at microcontroller chip manufacturer Broadcom, was frustrated with the status quo. Looking at the current generation of ARM-based microcontrollers he realized it was possible to use a low-cost (and relatively low power) chip to build a single-board computer. Using a system-on-a-chip architecture, you could bundle CPU and GPU and memory on a single chip. Using the SOC's general purpose IO ports, you could build it into a device that was easily expandable, booting from a simple SD storage card.
Work on what was to become the Raspberry Pi began in 2006, with a team of volunteers working with simple ARM SOC.
Can anyone remember the first program that they actually wrote (rather than copied from a magazine or downloaded from a friend's cassette tape)? Mine simply moved an asterisk around the screen 'bouncing' off the edges, and was written in Z80 assembly language. That is all I had on my Nascom 1.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday March 13 2022, @06:07PM
On the 1980s Atari (6502) platform, BASIC was... BASIC, but you had a somewhat easy entry to doing short bursts of 6502 assembly, and reasonable documentation of the hardware like the graphics and sound chips, so it was very possible to do clever things with a handful of bytes of 6502 assembly coded into a BASIC program for stuff BASIC never had a hope of touching.
Some of the more common tricks were vertical blank interrupt routines to play music (primitive MIDI-like music) in the background, horizontal interrupt handlers to change graphics registers as the screen drew so you could show one set of 16 colors above the interrupt line and a different set of 16 colors below the interrupt line - you could do this on dozens to hundreds of the horizontal interrupts so rainbow demonstrations were quite common.
I took a widely available (and horribly slow) BBS software written in BASIC and identified a couple of major bottlenecks, addressed them with assembly routines, and the whole package ran hundreds of times faster. It wasn't a situation of low hanging fruit, it was more a jungle begging for somebody with a machete to clear a path.
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