Raspberry Pi produces a “step function in fun”
Fun Squared
The Raspberry Pi computer has rekindled interest in tinkering with hardware and created a market for products combining the tiny computer with customized software.
Those of you who know me know that I designed electronics circuits in high school and then studied Electrical Engineering at Drexel University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania). Unfortunately during that career I was almost electrocuted by 13,600 volts and 800 amps (twice!). Fortunately I found software as much fun and a lot safer, other than paper cuts from ripping printouts. Back in those days electronic components were very expensive (US$ 128,000 for 64KB of core memory), so I took the software route and let someone else pay for the hardware.
I continued to be interested in hardware, and I even assembled my own computer from chips and prototyped digital circuits with the use of breadboards, sometimes with wire-wrapping. Soldering tens of thousands of pins perfected my soldering technique, and you really don’t want to know about the wire-wrapping.
Read full article as PDF:
091-091_maddog.pdf (228.12 kB)Tag Cloud
News
-
SCO Rises from the Swamp
Longtime litigator revives an ancient suit against IBM alleging Linux infringes on Unix copyrights.
-
UberStudent Project Releases UberStudent 3.0
Specialty distro keeps the focus on advanced learning.
-
openSUSE Conference Approaches
The openSUSE Conference will be held July 18-22, 2013, at the Olympic Museum in Thessaloniki, Greece.
-
Drupal.org Hacked
Security breached at home sites of the CMS project.
-
Oracle Takes Action on Java Security
Lead Java developer vows policy changes and more attention to fixing problems.
-
Google and NASA Partner in Quantum Computing Project
Vendor D-Wave scores big with a sale to NASA's Quantum Intelligence Lab.
-
Mageia Project Announces Mageia 3 Linux
Many package updates and Steam integration highlight the latest from the Mandriva-based community Linux.
-
FSF Outs the World Wide Web Consortium over DRM Proposal
Richard Stallman calls for the W3C to remain independent of vendor interests.
-
Debian 7.0 Debuts
The new release supports nine architectures, 73 human languages, and zero non-Free components.
-
Alpha Version of Fedora 19 Released
Fedora developers release the first alpha version of Fedora 19, known as Schrödinger’s Cat, for general testing. The final release is expected in July 2013.
