Computers and personalities

I see there have been at least a couple of recent recreations of the ZX Spectrum. One is a games-only machine (the ZX Spectrum Vega) with a cut-down keyboard. The other seems to be a complete reimplementation.

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Why post here? I wondered if, in the future, people would be as nostialgic for the Raspberry Pi - in, say, 30 years time. I don't think they would. Why? Well, the Pi is a more complete system. It is more of a general purpose machine, and more useful as a consequence. It doesn't have all the same types of quirks and limtations of the ZX Spectrum. Basically, those are what gave the Spectrum its personality.

Not wishing this to be pejorative, just an acceptance of the world as it is, but ISTM that the Raspberry Pi has fewer limitations and therefore has less of a personality. As with all modern machines they are more chameleon-like and less quirky, less limited to certain roles, more bland.

As users of the Pi what do you guys think? Am I right about why people are recreating versions of a 30-year-old computer? Is the Pi differently fated, and why?

Just for interest.

James

Reply to
James Harris
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My first job out of university in 1983 was writing games and games development software for Spectrum, Vic20, C64. I didn't think they were great machines when they paid my wages and I certainly am not nostalgic for them now.

Nor for the Amiga and its godawful OS software. I did think the Atari ST was OK. Awful OS but the hardware was cheap and powerful for the time.

What I did enjoy was that people thought about the games and there were many excellent games that were fun to play despite the pishy hardware they ran on. i.e. the game idea was fun. You still come across games which are fun amongst the quest for more graphical realism.

Raspberry Pi, it's a cheap bit of computing hardware. Nothing more.

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mm0fmf

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Reply to
The Natural Philosopher
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The huge sales, vast user-community support, and range of accessories have now raised it above that, though.

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David 
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Reply to
David Taylor

Indeed. It's community that matter most. Also, everyone remembers their first (of anything) with some nostalgia.

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Reply to
Folderol

I think it's popping quite a few Linux cherries too - people who wouldn't otherwise bother are trying it because it's the default RPi OS.

Reply to
Rob Morley

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Maybe. I don't think the "cheap" bit is relevant, though. If it were a costly piece of computing hardware it would still be just as personality-less. A faster CPU, bigger RAM, more USB ports etc would not change it into something with more character.

That's not to say that I am putting the Pi down. Nearly all computers sold today are just bits of hardware. Especially when they run a popular operating system such as Windows or a Unix or Android etc many of the remaining differences between machines get obscured, and that's a big part of what an OS is there to do.

The Pi's low-level IO features perhaps give it more character than most machines. You could argue that its lack of an internal clock gives it more character. I don't know. IMO that's probably more of a pain than an asset!

You could view the Raspberry Pi as a motherboard. If it were to be built into a case then it might be more distinct. Say multiple Pis were built into a desktop case to make a compute farm. The resulting machine would have its own character. Or say a Pi was built into a laptop. The laptop would have a particular screen and keyboard and look and feel and hence, IMO, its own character.

James

Reply to
James Harris

Agreed. There are lots of small and inexpensive Arm-based computers each with their own good and bad points. ISTM that the Raspberry Pi tends to be treated and regarded differently.

James

Reply to
James Harris

That sounds like a fun first job. Better than writing report-generation and accounts software!

I worked for a bank. Perhaps the most fun work I did there was programming the cheque sorters. We had so many milliseconds between the MICR or OCR characters being read to decide which pocket they should be routed to so as well as being distincive machines the programs had to work within a specific timing budget, making the task a bit different to the usual mainframe work.

Machines were awful at the time. All of them I remember had serious limitations. For example,

  • The Commodore Pet's Basic allowed only single-line functions. Its graphics were all blocks that you had to put together (and they didn't always juxtapose as they should have).
  • The ZX Spectrum's screen had hi-res graphics but the attributes covered an 8x8 square so you had to account for that.
  • One machine (I think a Nascom 2 but am not sure) refreshed the screen at 60 Hz and that could play havoc with a monitor run on 50 Hz mains. I remember one screen wobble so bad that it quickly felt like your eyes were being fried!

No one, I think, seriously wants to go back to those days.

By the way, the ZX Spectrum's keyboard was almost universally derided so it is suprising to hear that it has been recreated, in part, as a Bluetooth keyboard!

The machines of that era were bad in different ways. I find it odd that people want to recreate some of them but they do.

Then why not recreate those games today? Has the market moved on?

James

Reply to
James Harris

I had a similar $first_job - in my case it was an ICL service bureau with a 1903S and the special device was an Optical Mark Reader with similar timing limitations on sending a document to the output stacker, though if you were late the machine just became slow: if you missed the first opportunity to stack a sheet it just went round the drum another rev before being stacked.

The variety of work was a bit larger than in a bank (been there, done that too) and we used both the PLAN assembler and COBOL.

I saw Altairs and IMSAI micros during a contract in NYC and found out about the 6800 and its assembler at evening classes, but didn't get anything of my own until I could afford an SS-50 box based round a 6809 with two floppies and running Flex09 simply because, after several years on mainframes I wasn't willing to mess round with anything that didn't have at least two floppies for storage and a printer.

I look at the RPi very much as the current equivalent of my old FLEX09 system, though its much less hardware-hacker friendly thanks to its clock speed. I could and did design and build my own SS-50 cards because they were populated with big old DIP CMOS logic chips and, because the whole thing ran at 2MHz, the hardware could be debugged with a multimeter and a logic probe and/or a nice, cheapish 10 MHz oscilloscope.

These days, you're looking at $800-$1000 at least, used on Ebay for a scope that's fast enough to use on an RPi, to say nothing of dealing with surface-mount chips rather than DIP chips with 0.1" pin spacing.

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martin@   | Martin Gregorie 
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Reply to
Martin Gregorie

You obviously didn't use the BBC Micro, fast, great graphics, lots of I/O. I used all the way from school and then in industry for years. You had to know how to code efficiently, but it could still running rings around the new 80286 PC with EGA graphics, they thought could replace it.

I would in a heartbeat.

---druck

Reply to
druck

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