[COFF] A couple thoughts about BASIC

[Adam Thornton]

On Sat, Nov 23, 2024 at 5:27 PM G. Branden Robinson <
g.branden.robinson at gmail.com> wrote:

> At 2024-11-23T16:07:15-0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
> > I was one of those 80s kids who grew up with 6502s with BASIC in ROM.
>
> I was Z80 and M6809.  The rivalries back then were serious business. ;-)
>

Ah, a Radio Shack aficionado, I presume.



>
> But it seems like the price threshold is no longer a problem.  Maybe
> what we need is a completely hackable convergence device that you can
> plug into any commodity TV, keyboard, and thumb drive and go.  No need
> to build a radio into it.  Let that be an optional external peripheral.
>
>
That would be a Raspberry Pi.  SD card rather than thumb drive, but...$75
(I mean, I have a $9-many-years-ago thing that ran Linux, so it could be
cheaper, certainly, but a fairly fast ARM with several GB of memory is $75)
gets you...plug in the sd card, keyboard, mouse, and HDMI (newer Pis
require a Micro-HDMI to HDMI adapter, which is like another $5 or $10), and
you've got a fully functional Linux machine.  One would think that it
wouldn't be too hard to build an OLPC-like environment for it (it probably
already exists).

I'm amazed at how ubiquitous Pis are in the control system for the
telescope I work on, but maybe I shouldn't be.  After all: it's $75 for a
general-purpose Linux box with a bunch of GPIO pins to play with.  That's a
lot cheaper than designing a custom hardware anything.

Adam
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