Eben Upton - Life Before Raspberry Pi 

I was a BBC, Spectrum and Amiga guy. Still an Amiga guy :)

I think the difference is opportunity

For me it was the competition that drove me, partly due to the "friends with similar interests" you mentioned. We always tried to beat each other with better stuff. The thriving demoscene of those days played a part too, but a minor one for me as I tended to stick to Basic. AMOS in my case. I enjoyed optimizing Basic code for speed, and actually was able to copy a lot of typical demo effects that way. Even to this day that period had one of my proudest moments in life. I'd never programmed assembler before, and a friend did. I teased him occasionally saying it wasn't really that much harder, just a lot more work for a bit of extra speed. And at some point he basically told me to shut up and prove it. I told him "give me the assember and the manual, and tomorrow I'll have a working file requester (windowed, controlled by mouse) that outputs the name of the selected file to the command line." And I succeeded. Without the friendly competition among us I'd never have achieved it in a single day. And this was early 90's, I was born 1 year earlier than you were. It also taught me that assemby was not for me; that in some way my teasing comments were right. It felt like being an architect and having to build your designs literally brick by brick. Slow and tedious. I wanted faster results, so stuck to Basic, and 30 years later I still work in high level languages for 80% of the time. The other 20%? Contrary to what you'd expect now, I bought an Arduino instead of a Pi. I chose C instead of Python, mostly because I like the limits the Arduino poses on me. It's all about optimization again. And I recently acquired a Multitech Micro-Professor from the early 80's that I'm playing with now, so after all I still got to do some machine language. :-)

@@ArumesYT The MFP! Brilliant! The MFP I was Z80 assembler, if I'm right on that? I know (looking back) I'm fascinated by the MPF-II which was an Apple II clone of sorts.

@Aero01 We do. Very true. 👍

@@uforex911 I'm late to replying but here goes... I think you're definitely somewhat true, there's also I think a big helping of natural ability to enables someone to go further that someone else. But there's definitely something to be said for "right time, right place"

I was about 10 years in front of you but also used to access the PDP at Hatfield Poly from the Teletype at 'Turnford College (of Further Education', as I believe it was called then, now part of East Herts). Didn't do well at school (mid stream, wasn't interested, wasn't academic, like you, also mostly invisible), built a rowing dinghy in woodwork class before leaving at 15 to go to said college where I did what was called a 'Trans Ed' course for two years that was something the likes of me should have had access to from the beginning. Mornings were English, Maths, Physics and Technical drawing (to 'O level') and the afternoons were Electrical and electronic engineering, sheet metal work, catering, automotive engineering and welding. *Much* more real-world use to the likes of me. Luckily (at the time) I managed to get into BT for 5 years and enjoyed a good career in electronics / datacomms / IT / and IT Training, when it was still good. Like I actually *enjoyed* doing component level repair and was glad to have moved on, just as it went all board-swap. Sadly I still have most of the computers Eben mentions (from the day) but was never good at coding (and still aren't). Give me a soldering iron, a CCT diagram and some components ... or now an ESP32 and someone else's firmware ... ;-)

Yeah why?

@@TheCentreforComputingHistory I asked a question (just below) a year ago and nobody responded! Do 'you' still have the section of my post which was removed? I purchased a BBC 'B' for my family in 1983 when I retired (early!) from the Royal Navy.

ru-vid.comUgkxtpuESY34OxYzuUQ5TI3jsP8mCFUEfUeC

This was a 'test' to see if things are working from MY end. My message posted about 15 minutes ago has NOT appeared here. Odd!

It appears that if I include a link to a Jumpshare URL, the post which I make is duly removed (probably automatically) I suspect that it's a Google (RU-vid) ruling and nothing to do with The Centre for Computing History. It would be good to have that confirmed though!

You quote 10x the price he set - the Rasperry Pi is REALLY cheap! www.zdnet.com/article/raspberry-pi-how-i-spent-almost-150-on-a-35-computer/