How many homes have a digital TV. (plugs into the telly, like a zx80)
VGA is obsolete.
farnell will sell to anyone who has a, credit card, debit card. or equivalent...
-- ?? 100% natural
The ZX80 was a joke - rushed out to try and spoil the launch of Acorn's BBC Micro (Clive Sinclair was a very sore loser). Instead it provided a demonstration of just how well made and specified the BBC Model was when compared to a piece of fragile plastic tat with a dead flesh membrane keyboard. BBC Micro outsold the ZX80 by 15 to 1 despite being more than twice the price it offered so very much more to the user.
The Beebon never really worked on NTSC TVs which hampered its entry into the US market (but that was never in the graphics design spec).
The ZX81 was actually a slightly more reasonable piece of kit. But by then there were a host of other players in the market. It did roughly equal the sales of the BBC Micro in this later incarnation. But then Sinclair went off the rails with the doomed QL and its data destroying microdrives. The rest is history.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
ZX81 (The ZX80 successor) was discontinued in 1984. VGA was introduced in
1987. You are AlwaysWrong.Yeah, why are you AlwaysWrong?
The Raspberry Pi has an HDMI output for connection to any TV set of
*its* time :-)
RP uses a standard $5 USB keyboard. I have a stack of them.
RP uses state-of-the-arg gcc plus EVERY OTHER language you can get for Linux. FORTRAN? Pascal? Lisp? Perl? Python? ASM? Turtle graphics? All there, and it all runs on the RP.
RP can do that too.
RP's work on 90% of the TVs out today.
RP uses standard cell phone power supplies. I have a dozen around here.
RP is hoping that happens again. Arduino certainly saw that happen.
RP has 256 Meg of ram, and the "bus" is USB, but there are other connections on the RP too.
I see no evidence of a $100 price anywhere...
A third the price, a lot more functionality, and you say it's value is zero?
Hey look! A decent diagram and links:
Then don't buy it, more for us.
On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:41:14 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie wrote in :
That limited stock huh? :_)
The difference here is that the ZX80/81 had schematics and there was nothing proprietary about it (Z81 manuals could be had for the cost of printing, or often free if you asked nicely). The RP has a proprietary ARM processor that one needs to sign an NDA to obtain the full specs/programming info for. That's a rather higher barrier to entry than someone just fooling around in their bedroom with the ZX81...
I think it's a neat board, but if I had a kid who was interested in checking out something like this, I'd definitely steer them to something like the Beagleboard that, even though it's more expensive, is completely open and documented. (I mean, I kinda doubt Broadcomm would even enter into an NDA with, say, a 14-year-old, would they?)
I also predict the cost of the board will slowly creep up over time, just as it did with OLPC.
---Joel
Well, 10,000 units in the first run, and about 10X that for demand. They say they're ramping up as fast as they can. They are, after all, a charity.
The ASIC design files were proprietary. The Z80 microcode and chip design was proprietary. The firmware sources were proprietary. Every computer has some line between "published" and "secret". So what if you don't have a pinout for the RPi mcu? There's no way you could solder to that tiny BGA anyway.
I think we need to adjust our view of what the RPi is about - it's a COMPONENT in a bigger project. It's a TOY to learn Linux and embedded design with. It's an INTERFACE for other parts of your project. It's CHEAP enough to throw away if you accidentaly fry it. It comes with LINUX pre-installed so you don't have to worry about the low-level hardware anyway. RPi isn't targetting the 0.01% who want to get into chip design and writing hardware drivers. They're targetting the 1% who want to build things with them.
Besides, the RPi foundation says they'll release the schematics and a SoC datasheet, so save your hating for later ;-)
The RPi is not about figuring out how the RPi itself works. The RPi is about figuring out how other things work. Do you have schematics for your desktop PC? Datasheets for that proprietary NVidia card? Do you even care what the USB electrical bitstream looks like? Or do you just plug compatible things into it and go from there?
I had a ZX81. Built one or two expansion cards for it. Yes, I had the schematics, but other than the connector pinout they were not useful.
You don't need that level of detail to control the GPIO ports or a USB device. Since it's ARM, there's already enough documentation to do things I'd expect a 14-year old to do with it.
You also believe every promise a politician makes when elections are coming up? It is more likely that not a single unit has been assembled yet. Nobody knows until they actually get delivered.
-- Failure does not prove something is impossible, failure simply indicates you are not using the right tools... nico@nctdevpuntnl (punt=.) --------------------------------------------------------------
I believe that they said that, and I believe that they're a charity. I've been following their blogs, and they did say that the first batch was built, last they mentioned it they were sending someone to the factory to test them and see to shipping them back. I can't prove any of this is true, but I have no reason to doubt it either.
I'm not an idiot, but I'm not a total cynic either. I know people who have held a RPi in their hands, and I'm part of the project to port Fedora to ARM (the RPi runs Fedora, not Ubuntu - and Ubuntu does not
*want* the RPi to even claim they run Ubuntu), so I'm slightly more of an "insider" than the average person.
Check and double check. At the Homebrew Computer Club in Silicon Valley, early daze, when the apple FIRST came out it was a kit of boards and parts; a complete DIY that became so popular that the product morphed a number of times and the backers morphed also (into a company). Then there was an 8008 "kit" where one could get a manual that included full-size B&W "tapeouts" of each board, monitor listings, etc. Parts and boards were also available. Oh yeah..did i forget to mention the Altair 8080 the first full kit that cost about the same as the chocolate bar "chip"?
Them wuz heady daze when one could actually learn ALL about a computer, literally from the inside out.
I dare you to BUILD one from scratch that allows: Floppy A and B,
256-byte sector R/W, deleted sector R/W, support of 8" floppies all densities up to 1.2Meg and 5.25" floppies all densities to 800K and 3.5" floppies all densities to 2.88M, and up to 4096-byte sectors, and variable density sectors. You CANNOT find all of the documentation to do the hardware to make it possible. The hardware since the Pentium removed the HARDWARE to do deleted sector R/W; write all the SOFTWARE you want and it ain't gonna werk. More recent hardware changes locked out the "B" floppy drive. Etc..
Go back under the carpet!
I do not think there was such a thing a s channel 36..been too long - think the tops was channel 13.
Floppy support is a single chip and BIOS support. The reason we do not see it any more is because mobo makers are not incorporating it, NOT because it has been phased out to the point of not being able to be implemented.
Most MOBOs WITH floppy support have quit supporting 2.88, even though it merely amounts to a bit more BIOS space. The chips handle it fine.
Sadly, the 2.88 was the most reliable of the bunch.
Bullshit. Same chip. Simply no longer added to the BIOS, and they are no longer putting the header in either any more. The only thing you got right.
Fuck you baerass. I was putting the retard JanPan in his retarded place.
If you are not also going senile, you should refrain from defending the total ditz.
I wasn't talking to you, FUCKHEAD! So FUCK OFF AND DIE, BOY.
It is a typo, dumbfuck.
Your common sense quotient is even lower than anyone else yet this week.
Well the ZX80 was a really good joke. It merely provided a backdrop to show just what a good job Acorn did with the BBC Micro. A machine that could actually stand up to the hammer it got in a classroom full of kids.
The flimsy plastic of a ZX80 would break as soon as you looked at it.
That you were too thick or dope crazed to work out how to use it does not surprise me at all.
Up to 640x200 2 colour graphics and 320x200 4 colour graphics with a palette of 16. Viruses were largely unknown then. Worms did turn up on mainframes and minis from time to time though.
No. I would not waste money on one.
I did own an SC/MP kit and an Acorn atom and had access to everything else up to and including one of the first Apple Macs in the UK.
All home computers of that era were tape based storage. Microdrives came later on the QL and were the absolute nadir of data security and transportability. They were to all intents and purposes write only devices that would stretch the tape loop and self destruct under even light use. Add on disk drives were one of the things we all did.
Amstrad chopped Sinclairs legs off by doing a similar product to the QL but with reliable floppy disks instead called PCW (or Joyce).
laptop
So you buy crap computer kit as a hobby then even today.
these days
It was a huge success apart from in your deluded and deranged mind.
C4 is a well known plastic explosive. Application to a C5 improved it. The risible C5 was Uncle Clive's sit down on road bicycle with battery assist (he called it an electric vehicle) and a monumental flop.
You can sometimes still find them at seaside resorts. Riding one on the public roads protected only by a feeble red flag in the air was suicide.
I see you don't count using Google among your core skills either.
[paranoid rant deleted]You are completely insane. You should cut down on the drugs!
-- Regards, Martin Brown
On a sunny day (Mon, 05 Mar 2012 16:13:22 -0500) it happened DJ Delorie wrote in :
Next thing Breadcom and RatHead are charities too. :-)
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