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.
About two years ago, I became involved with the Arduino [1], which has been a lot of fun, but my time with it was limited, and to me it was not a "real" computer because it did not run GNU/Linux.
[...]
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