Setting aside the abusive and somewhat infantile interjections from (too) many quarters, it remains that my interest in the Pi 3 is as a vehicle for low-level systems programming on a 64 bit architecture.
Is anyone else here inspired excitedly by such things, just as we were with our naked PDPs back inthe 1970s?
One such challenge on the PDP11-20 was to write a program that left ALL of memory cleared (including the last instruction to be executed) and with all the registers cleared.
If you haven't looked at the Beagle Bone, it is also a great vehicle, and has a lot more I/O. I've used it in some projects with great success. The Beagle Bone Green has the video output removed, and is a lot cheaper. All of the "Bones" have two 200 MHz 32-bit RISC microcontrollers they call "PRU"s (Programmable Real Time Units) that have high-speed direct I/O pins. So, you can have 5 ns interaction with a small set of I/O pins. I emulated an old DMA card with it, sending pixels to a laser photoplotter every 5 us.
Jon
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