In the beginning there was a Sinclair Spectrum with Sinclair OS, and a 64 character wide word processor with a 4 pixel wide character set (tasword).
Then there was an IBM PC clone with MSDOS something and Wordstar, quickly replaced with Xywrite.Then I died and went to heaven, Sun 3-50, 4Mb RAM, 70Mb HDD, 19in mono monitor. Tools – perl, gcc (or cc) sometimes. Overlapping windows – Sunview window system. Followed quickly by a Sun 3-60, 8Mb Ram, 155Mb HDD, Colour 19in Monitor, then a SPARC station 1, 8Mb, 320MB HDD, but the rot had set in, Solaris2.2.
I sometimes muse upon if Bill Joy had won, and BSD had triumphed over ATT System 5. (After all, BSD is still the Foundation of MacOS and IOS). Yes, I understand the background to all the fighting between DEC, Sun, Apollo, HP. And something to really muse on is if Apollo and DomainOS had been significantly more successful with some extremely advanced ideas. By comparison, SunOS3.5 was a blacksmiths toolkit. (which did not require to be explained to the wide variety of skills of the customers). DomainOS was just a tad ahead of it’s time. And we are still stuck with X-Windows after all the years, although the cruft is extremely well hidden.
The future – Raspbian and the Raspberry Pi made out of cell-phone components is a worthy successor to all of this. 8 core ARM CPU, 4Gb memory (next version), M2 interface, boot from 1TB SSD please (pidrive on steroids). But retain the micro-SD card for the numerous projects where an SSD is not cost-effective.
Dear Mr Upton,
I’d like a low profile Rasberry pi please. Micro USB connectors instead of 4 large ones, dump the audio connector (audio – hdmi out), micro HDMI connector, do a right angle GPIO header. The only puzzle is the ethernet connector – maybe a short pigtail from a proprietary connector. Current height of Raspberry PI (17mm) could be simply reduced to 9mm, and to 6mm if Display and Camera connectors (which I have never used) were to be breathed upon. 6mm board height opens up numerous ideas for unobtrusive computing.
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