A single-board command-line computer using the esp32. Look at it! It's cute. Can't buy it yet the creator is starting some kind of online commune for single-board computer freaks. I bet some of you are around here, go say hi at his forum it only has like two posts and its making me sad.
There is a practical side to my interest in minimalist computers:
I have this notion about a math/CS curriculum where students build and program their own calculators. Once you make the calculator do it you never need to do it yourself again.
I have my students program their TI84s to factor, and simplify square roots, any annoying task can become a more annoying but also more fun programming project.
@futurebird i value the learning experience i had in high schoo/college of studying digital electronics form the transistor on up hierarchically to central processsing units and then learning to progem them in machine code. i think it gives important insights philosophically.
and then at the same time i learned about molecular biology.
I don't know why I'm so attracted to little computers like this. Maybe it's the retro futurism? Maybe it's the prospect of understanding how every component in my computer works for a few beautiful moments in the day.
Maybe it's thinking about how fun it'd be to text secret messages with a little cyberpunk looking card.
Anyway, if you have ever wanted to make something like this know you will have fans. You don't need to explain why... just make it!
@futurebird One of the attractions of old home/hobbyist-oriented computers to me was that in those days, the idea of programming the machine was always very prominently featured. Maybe just as a way to sell them to parents as more than just video game consoles. Maybe because the productivity applications they had were not very powerful and programming was one of the few things you really could do. But they made it easy to get started, and it got a generation of kids into it.
Modern machines like the Raspberry Pi do have some of that emphasis.
There were negative sides of this. I've heard that this contributed to women actually being pushed out of computer science and software engineering, since these computers tended to be marketed to boys (largely through their video-game aspect), and in the 1980s the pernicious idea developed that you weren't going to make it in the field unless you were a "whiz kid" with youthful coding experience at home.
@futurebird I like small computers, whether modern or retro, when they are simple enough for a single person to understand and program directly at the hardware level.
@faassen@futurebird
Went there and followed a link to this gem:
"The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked."
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