The Rasberry Pi might just bring home brew computing back

If you havent heard of the Rasberry Pi, you might be forgiven for thinking its something you eat. However, it is actually a ARM based micro computing project brought to us by David Braben. Yes, that David Braben ! The one who wrote Elite for the BBC micro back in the mid eighties that had everyone going nuts with the 3D universe you could fly around in. Now, he's bringing us a RISC based computer that is small enough to fit in one hand, with HDMI, ethernet, USB, and god knows what else for a mere £15.  Yep, you read that right - £15. Or $25 for the Americans. This is incredible. David's vision is that this little device, which runs a version of Debian Linux, will inspire kids to get into understanding the nuts and bolts of computing, rather than just play with powerpoint, or Paint programs. Computing is just not taught properly in schools, and David Braben was very worried that we are heading for a computing skills vacuum in the UK, as kids are using PCs and XBOXes that just dont allow you to get under the hood any more. Old school computers used to make it easy to understand how they worked at a low level. Computers like the ZX81 could be understood in their entirety by a teenager. There were no abstraction layers, or video libraries back then. You had some RAM, and bunch of BASIC or assembler command, and a bunch of ports you could PEEK or POKE. Simple. And, extremely educational. Most kids these days would be lucky if they could delve into javascript while in school, and most have no chance of understanding anything about processors.

Hopefully the Raspberry Pi will enthuse younger minds, and we can see some great, fun projects being built on the back of it. It could easily be used as a controller for battling robots, for instance. I cant wait to see what happens.  Check out the Raspberry Pi project