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Comment by Smoosh | Hacker News Reader

The popularity of the Raspberry Pi and Arduino makes me wonder why there wasn't more exploitation of the I/O capabilities of the simple PCs of the early days. I suppose there must have been some I/O breakout devices, but they were very niche. I guess it was a combination of cost (too expensive to dedicate a pc to a single task), and lack of cheap but useful electronics to connect to (though relays and switches could do many useful things).

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There were loads of addons and I/O projects. For just a taste, take a look at eg Usborne's "How to make Computer Model Controllers" from https://usborne.com/gb/books/computer-and-coding-books

(Direct link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FqhExLPJZHakw6RpNr_LKtmtk1h...)

Or the works of R.A.Penfold

You may want to downgrade your ideas of what the tech could do. No networking, no radio control of any kind, no real time clock, no battery backup, no WiFi, no app or web control, very limited graphics, no memory card boot, not fast enough for most applications that needed an ADC, nowhere near reliable enough to run for long periods unattended.

And expensive. The basic £49.95 kit would have cost the equivalent of £200 today. Add 16K RAM and some I/O and the price was more like £400 - which is well over what most people would spend on a box that might turn some lights on and off.

It's pretty easy to do something useful with a Pi. You'll probably end up with a mess of wires, sensors, and relays, but the core stack is fast enough to run a web server and to control useful peripherals.

Compared to a ZX81, the Pi is a supercomputer. Literally. It's equivalent to 80s era supermainframes. But super cheap. So of course you can do far, far more with it.

It was possible, just a geeky niche because folks had to do pretty much everything themselves. X10 ruled the day for remote control, and that was straight forward. Everything was costly, so there was that factor.

There was a great story in one of the computer mags of the day (Kilobaud, perhaps). Mid-80s, pre-PC. A fellow had a system (S-100 box I think) that had sensors, speech, and voice recognition. He could "Hey Siri, start a timer" type of commands.

Alas, the system was imperfect, as they all were. One day, the owner was doing something with solvents and changing clothes in the garage when the fumes set off the fire detector. Despite his pleas to cancel, the system proceeded to not just inform the fire department, but set off an alarm, and open the garage door (part of his fire escape plan) to reveal to his neighbors a shouting, half naked man, dancing in their garage.

Anyone who has seen "Electric Dreams" knows the downsides of home automation.

Back in the day, the printer port was the way to interface experiments on the cheap. I had a spare printer card just in case I blew one up. There were expensive A/D boards and such used in labs, but it was too expensive for hobbyists. On the cheap, best to use a commodore 64.

There was a lot less cool sensors and peripherals. Everything was more expensive and more difficult, but people did build a lot of cool things, like hacking the Altair to play music on a radio with its RF interference.

It is kind of amazing that a fairly full-featured 1 GHz/512MB PC running a Unix-like OS is only $5, so you can afford to use it as an embedded microcontroller.

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