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Comment by NickPollard | Hacker News Reader

Whilst I would certainly agree it would be nice for the chip to be open-sourced, saying that it means the Pi is 'already dead' is ridiculous hyperbole.

The Raspberry Pi is designed for computer science education, but it's designed primarily for Children, not University Students. If you're at the point of running 'Advanced Operating Systems' courses then you can find whatever you need, but 12 year olds aren't likely to be doing that.

What they folks at Rasberry Pi are trying to do is encourage people who've never coded before to start writing programs. If they can write simple userspace linux programs (I'm talking text adventures and the like) that's what's important. The device isn't intended to replace ultra-hackable low level devices, it's just a cheap PC that children can tinker with without their parents yelling at them if they break the family PC.

The Rasberry Pi is anything but dead.

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They absolutely don't need special hardware to start programming.

I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that my first exposure to coding was when I typed "10 PRINT BUTT 20 GOTO 10" into BBC BASIC. I didn't need anything more than the computer I had at school. The modern-day equivalent - typing "python" into the terminal - isn't much different, and still a lot easier and cheaper than getting something to run on an external Linux board.

This IS today's version of the BBC Micro. AFAIK, the BBC Micro was a cheap design to encourage computer education since regular PCs were very expensive.

I too cut my teeth on a BBC Micro. My school had ~20 of them. If they'd bought PCs, they would have had maybe 5?

The Raspberry Pi will do the same thing today, especially in poor countries which don't have computers as a matter of course in their schools.

You're talking from an overly Western-centric perspective when you say that typing "python" is cheaper than the RPI.

The world has 7 billion people, many of whom live in poor countries. At $35 with the ability to use a regular TV as a console, this thing is well within the reach of poor person even in a poor country like India to buy as a splurge for his kid who he's told my their teacher is bright.

I, for one, think this is going to be revolutionary.

PS: I also plan to use it for some home automation projects. It can run off of batteries (!!!!!), and is a plain old GNU/Linux distro. How cool is that.

The BBC Micro was actually quite expensive compared to the other micros of the time. (I don't think the IBM PC was ever considered a "micro", and other micros were probably more capable anyway.) If I remember correctly, the goal was not to produce a design that would compete mostly on cost but rather one that was British and would do the flashy stuff the BBC wanted to show on their computing series.

I agree that the Raspberry Pi will be revolutionary, not because it will rejuvenate computer science teaching, but simply rather because it's a cheap computer.

> I agree that the Raspberry Pi will be revolutionary, not because it will rejuvenate computer science teaching, but simply rather because it's a cheap computer.

Yep. It looks we were mostly in agreement then! :)

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