rediscovering the joy of general purpose computing

A few years ago, I got to narrate the audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. It’s primarily about how creators can make a living online, and contains a ton of useful advice on doing that successfully. It’s also about the power and significance of General Purpose Computing.

I’ll try to paraphrase Cory in a way that makes sense: Until recently, a computer was a dumb collection of circuits and storage that did whatever its owner wanted it to do. You want your computer to play games? Done. You want your computer to be a word processor? Done. Want to change the operating system? Go nuts. Want to get into the guts of it and hack the hardware to do something nifty? You got it! You owned that computer, in every way that mattered, because it was General Purpose, and was able to do whatever you wanted it to do.

In the last decade or so, we’ve seen the rise of computers that are locked down, specialized machines which only do what their manufacturers want them to do. They do this not only by restricting your access to the operating system and the hardware, but by passing laws that made it a crime to take apart the thing you bought! Companies like Apple and Microsoft lobbied for and got laws that made it illegal for you to buy an iPad or a smartphone, and then modify the device that you paid for to do a thing that you wanted it to do.

There’s more to it, but that’s the basic gist of where we are right now. If this subject interests you at all, you will likely enjoy Cory’s book, whether you get it in print or ebook or via my delightful voice.

I say all this to contextualize why I am so magnificently in love with my Raspberry Pi, and why I have gone from a single Pi acting as a server under my desk, to having three Pis in my home, including one that’s being turned into a Picade, and one that’s about to become this smart lamp, because what I need in my life is another gadget that blinks.

No, seriously. It’s something I need in my life, because I can make it myself, using a general purpose computer to do a simple task, and I can use Tinkercad and my 3D printer to make the lamp case that will go around the LEDs.

The two computers I remember best from when I was a kid are the Atari 400 and the Ti99/4a. When you turned those computers on, you BASICally (that’s funny, kids, trust me and go ask an Old if you don’t) got a screen with a single prompt that usually told you the computer was >>READY while it waited for you to tell it what to do. If you wanted to run a game, you told it to >>RUN LODERUNNER or whatever. If you wanted to call a BBS, you typed in a string of commands that were like sanskrit to a 10 year-old, and hoped your mom didn’t pick up the phone in the kitchen while you were waiting for the second hour of the sexiest GIF you would ever find to finish downloading. Those computers did what I told them to do, and that usually meant that I had to learn how to make them do it. It made me curious about what was inside them, to understand how they worked, to push the limits of what they could do. It encouraged me to learn some simple programming, and it (usually) rewarded my curiosity and commitment to learning.

The thing those computers didn’t do was tell me that I couldn’t do something because a marketing department or executive or shareholder wanted to prevent me from doing it, so they could sell me something else that would do that thing. Once we bought the computer, we owned it, and as much as I enjoy my tablets and smartphones and iMacs and whatever, getting back to my Linux command line and learning Python and talking to other enthusiasts online about what they’re doing with their little Raspberry Pis is reawakening this passion and joy that has been dormant inside of me for a long, long time.

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41 thoughts on “rediscovering the joy of general purpose computing”

  1. I can’t wait for my son to bust out the Raspberry Pi he’s getting for Christmas. I’m geeking out for him. Also, I told a similar Dad joke about computers recently while talking to my son. I said something along the lines of, “Our technology was so primitive is was LITERALLY CALLED BASIC”. My friends, my age, all giggled at my witticism while my son gave me a blank stare.

  2. I’m glad you found the Raspberry Pi. I’ve got three of them on my Broadband-Hamnet MESH network, and another two waiting for me to build them. I’m also planning on building a four stack Raspberry Pi cluster, so I can experiment with distributed parallel programming. The Raspberry Pi is a wonderful and cheap way to experiment with computers.

    Btw, I’ve also discovered the joy of giving them to friends, to introduce them to Linux. I’ve given away three of them this year, and plan on doing more.

  3. Oh the days of having to craft the mind of your computer so it would understand you and do what you wanted it to. Thing is, when you did your task, it was YOUR task, YOU were in control – not some suit in a far off room who knows way less than you do. Glad you found your passion again. Run with it, and see how far it takes you!

  7. Perhaps by the time I’m 100, I won’t mind buying gear that thinks it knows more about what I want than I do, but based on my experience of trends in both h/w and s/w, I don’t see that happening any time soon. The more a piece of tech assumes it knows what I want (and then goes on to prove that it really, really, REALLY doesn’t), the more tightly my dollar bills will cling to my wallet.

    One of my highest priorities in tech purchases is my ability to configure a product to work as precisely the way I want it too as possible. It’s not always an option, depending on the market and my level of interest in a given device, but more often than not I find I’m still able to buy something that allows me to do as I like. And I have certainly ditched both gear and apps that suddenly copped an attitude and informed me “you know that stuff you used to love to do with me, well, you either can’t now or you can only do it THIS way, which will totally annoy you”.

    The tech world will always have to strike a balance between products “ready for the stupid or ‘I don’t really care’ user” and products “ready for the power user who demands the ability to craft their own experience”. And the pendulum will doubtless swing back and forth between sides, depending on how many folks are willing to spend a bit of extra money on the latest new idea that brings them closer to their personal preference points.

    As for me … I’m ready to plunk down some extra cash for both h/w and s/w that has as its design goal “allowing the user to create the experience they want” and to withhold cash from designers and developers who wish to assure me “No, no really, I know what you want, and I’ve found a lazy way to give you half of that in a way you won’t enjoy … but you should enjoy it, because I do, and I’m better than you.”

    Before I can have serious fun again with the world of tech toys, I’ll have to wait for the market pendulum to start swinging away from “duller, dumber, lazier and less useful” and for some eager entrepreneurs to realize that there are bucks to be made giving people what THEY want and not what manufacturers and developers find easier to make.

  9. While I still occasionally have to bang bits and bytes on bare-bones ARM M0 processors embedded in things like Bluetooth radio chips (relying on my hard-won skills from the dawn of the microprocessor age), these days I much prefer to play on my Pi in Python.

    I’m blown away by the RasPi3: It lets do real-time video processing that, back in the early ’90’s, required two large VME crates filled with $250K of hardware (and that’s 1990 dollars).

    While the RasPi3 can’t train deep neural nets in realistic amounts of time (due to limited RAM and useless swap), it is more than capable of running trained nets for a wide variety of applications.

    Despite having such power, it still lets you play directly with I/O pins and SPI/I2C serial buses: Blinky is awesome.

    I could never have imagined a credit-card sized computer doing so much for so little cost!

    And it’s mine, all mine!

  11. I’m buying the twins kano’s for their 9th birthday next month. I’m a little geeked out about it just like this

  14. This is only my highly subjective opinion but, I thinks the reason companies lock down devices these days are in part due to two things.

    It’s easier to monetize it. 2. We live in such a sue happy culture they are trying to limit their liability. Just my opinion and by no means comprehensive.

  15. First off… BASICally LOL… oh sheesh I’m old… I still have one of my old books that you used to program games into your C64. It would take hours to type all that BASIC code in, and then pray to god that you didn’t make a typo on line 35. As a kid, the way I got new video games was by buying a magazine at the local book store (that wasn’t 100 bazillion square feet) and typing in the source code I found in the back. If I was really lucky it might come with a 5.25″ floppy with a game already on it. Those were the super cool special editions that cost all of my pocket change.

    Secondly, it’s really timely that you posted this today. I just came across this article on The Verge (http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14037686/apple-macbook-macos-focus-mobile-features-ios) where they talked about the slow demise of macOS, and how Apple has discovered that they can make a ton more money on iOS which is in many ways, a special purpose computer OS. It’s meant for tablets and phones, where you cannot alter any source code, and even customizing the system is extremely limited. But macOS is still a nice general purpose OS for getting work done. In fact it was because it was Unix under the covers that I switched over to macOS from Linux many years ago. I could get a really nice GUI, and some games, and still open up a command shell and get “real work” done.

    Your post today is making me think I need to pick up a pi sometime and get back to playing with something where the boundaries are based on my initiative, not corporate lock-down.

  16. Started off my journey in tech with the TI 99/4a as well. Loved that machine, but damn the RS-232 cable from the expansion box was a nightmare!! Learned to program in so many different languages that no longer exist, but loved playing Parsec, Burger Time, and a host of other games… Programming in BASIC and saving the code to a cassette recorder and hoping I was documenting where, on the tape, the program was located, correctly… I miss those days a lot more than I thought I would. A simpler time BBS’ing…

  18. That sounds fun, and also it would maybe make me a little insane. I would probably never figure it out because I’m crafty, but maybe not super duper tech savvy…
    However, I did use my favorite household gadget again today and have a recommendation. This $6 fucker will save you a shit ton of money if you use batteries a lot (aka, children with toys amirite?!)
    https://www.amazon.com/Amprobe-BAT-200-Battery-Tester/dp/B005G7SBY4/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482370637&sr=8-1-spons&keywords=battery+tester&psc=1
    Amazon amprobe battery tester. The link gets me nothing. I am just amazed AMAZED at the fact that literally every time I change batteries in something, at least one of them is still perfectly good. Very often only one battery is dead and the others are still good. You would not believe how many batteries this ridiculous thing will save. I love it so much I’m gonna take it out behind the middle school and get it pregnant.

  19. BASICally got a screen, I LOL at that one. Reminds of my Commodore 64, flick a switch and there it said Ready with a blinking cursor and you had to know what to type to make it do stuff. Used to program all the time and then I got an Amiga and was like “wait, I don’t need to program stuff…other people have done it” and I just got away from programming and figuring out how to make the computer do something, I would just search for a program to do it.

  20. I’m building my niece and nephew a Minecraft server for Christmas. It’s my second Raspberry Pi in six months; the first one is now my media jukebox. Raspberries 5ever!

  22. I need to play around with the RasPi more. But don’t let The Man tell you what to do with your tech! As soon as I bought my wife a Nook Color, I installed CyanogenMod on it so she could run full Android on it. My original Xbox quickly morphed into my first XBMC machine to stream media from my home server to the living room. And I have now turned three Chromeboxes into media boxes running LibreELEC (Embedded Linux Entertainment Center = KODI).

  23. Definitely build the Picade, I have one, it’s great and the guy who runs Pimoroni (Pirates, monkeys robots ninjas) is a top bloke. Also, try out the Pi camera, so when you do I can say “Wil Wheaton uses software I wrote”!

    1. I have the camera sitting on my desk, waiting for me to install it and figure out precisely what I’m going to use it for!

  24. Hey Wil. I have a bunch of raspberry pi computers, from an original 256 mb model B to the newest pi 3 . I’ve built networked animation cameras with them, and follow the bare metal code work closely.

    For pure conversation value, I attended the taping if your Wil Wheaton show the time Andy Serkis was your guest… I mentioned Game Dude in the valley during a chatty break.

    Glad to see this bug bit you. It’s a very satisfying thing to do.

  26. I remember the days of you working with NewTek and the Video Toaster back in the early 90’s. I was a Commodore hardware tech at the time and I miss the days on knowing what every line in the boot sequence meant. But video editing has got SO much easier, it took a lot of expensive equipment just to do A/B roll from tape. Now a $200 desktop will do it from digital video files.

    I also miss the fast boot times of those old systems, when you are not loading megabytes of operating system it is “ready to go” quickly. Of course you then had to load whatever program you wanted to run, sometimes from floppy…

  27. I started with a TRS-80 Color Computer 2. By the time I was 19 I was supplementing my income by building machines for 500 bucks and selling them for 1000. Of course, this was before Asus and Toshiba started selling 300 dollar laptops. That led to working as a computer engineer for the last 22 years. Case modding took up years of my free time.

    I tried to get into app development, to recapture the same type of customization feeling, but it just isn’t there. RPi’s now populate my basement, including one running a pretty solid retro Mame Picade with 4 controllers, two trackballs, and more than 10,000 games. My youngest is about to turn 7, and his first RPi is already wrapped. He’s a couple of years older than I was when I started BASIC programming. So I am kind of excited to see where he will go with it. We don’t have 3D printer yet, but he’s so into Lego’s that I think the case will be a Lego Tie Fighter or something.

    If I can just pass this on to ONE of my kids, I’ll give myself a high-five when he graduates high school.

  28. I still have my TI99/4A! It even still works although the joysticks are rather challenging to still use. I think it’s longevity is definitely due to its location at our summer place. So it never got used during typical New England stay inside weather. No one can beat me at MunchMan at this point. 😉

    And I also have fond memories of typing in BASIC programs from the Sunday comics. I keep wondering if that’s where they really were from but my brain swears there was a weekly program in the comics section. After the cassette player cable died, I’d just leave the computer on as long as Mom would let me to save my program.

  29. Wil: I could hug you, right now. This is a sentiment that I’ve held onto throughout my entire life. My first computer was an Atari 800, and it was the first computer that I learned to program (in BASIC, machine language, and Forth), and I too agree it is something that had been lost, that is starting to be rediscovered in some very sideways manners, ranging from the readily available embedded ARMs like the Pi, to games with generalized Turing logic like Minecraft (the kids who truly discover what is possible with those command blocks, will be one camp among many of the next generation of meta-hackers). We have to reintroduce the social constructs of making things, of repairing them, of making things do; way beyond the descriptions on the box… don’t worry, it will happen.

    10 PRINT CHR$(INT(RND(0)*2)+6);:GOTO 10

    -Thom

  30. For making things blink, or more, check out the CHIP computer from Next Thing Co. It’s like a Pi, but $9. I used it to add Airplay to my 1970s console stereo. And for $9, I don’t think I could have done it cheaper.

    My current project is learning Assembly so I can make games for my Atari 800XL. 🙂

    1. I kickstarted the CHIP, so I have two of them. I have no idea what to do with them, though. Any great ideas for projects you care to share?

      1. I’m the Director of Technology for a school district, and was really excited to kickstart the CHIP and the PocketCHIP. Of course, since then I haven’t had time to see how we could use them in the district.

        But personally, I’ve played around with installing Shairpoint-sync and can now play music wirelessly to the 1970s console stereo of my youth (I don’t have a picture of it, but here’s one that’s pretty close: https://auctionimages.s3.amazonaws.com/66311/29509/20858473.jpg)

        I’ve also hooked it up to an old CRT monitor and played with pico-8, a “fantasy console” that looks a lot like old school video games along with emulators. Minecraft is now available for it, but I haven’t played with it yet.

        Another idea i’ve played with is the Piratebox, creating a stand-alone wifi box to share public domain and CC licensed content.

          1. Oh, and if you use iTunes, you can set up multiple CHIPs with Shairport-sync and they will all play in sync, which is pretty cool.

  31. I like to think there is room for both in the world. We actually have similar laws for our homes and few complain: we can change app(liance)s and add screen protectors, but we need a permit to trash it and build a new one or even defragment the living spaces.

    I do believe in freedom, and true freedom comes in having choices between those nicely manicured, walled gardens and the sometimes rickety, obtuse open hardware and software.

    I love my PocketCHIP (mentioned above) as much as I do my Nintendo 3DS, two devices at each end of the “open” spectrum. Interestingly, there is a program I bought for my 3DS, SmileBASIC (smilebasic.com/en/), that turns the device into what amounts to an old C64 or Apple II – a little, general-purpose, BASIC-controlled operating system running in a virtual machine that gives me that same blank screen, blinking cursor, and limitless possibilities. It’s a little bit of general-purpose computing contained within a walled garden, and it’s actually pretty glorious.

    I believe in freedom, and I desperately want to have those open, free, and unfettered pieces of computing available to me, as one day they may be all I have when the gardens are demolished or arbitrarily chained off. However, I’m not capable of framing a house from a stand of trees, with or without a permit, so I gotta start with what I know.

  32. You’re spot on with the Raspberry Pi, it and its like are to me like little beacons of hope for future hackers and builders. I share your aversion to the wrangling and netting of devices, but then again, though I may disagree with it I can understand the why.

    My Mom on Windows, my Dad on Mac. Both are fairly literate, but both are also helpless should they need to troubleshoot an error (or sometimes even just an update) of any kind. With Windows being more open, my Mom has been the victim of identity theft,numerous viruses, and loads of malware, all thanks to her curiosity coupled with the blind confidence of her actions on the machine. My Dad has suffered no such obstacles, aside from the occasional update or connection error.

    I do feel like there are plenty of us who feel highly confident navigating a technical interface, but you can’t discount the number of people who can only barely pull up Netflix. In the coming generations I anticipate that the number of ‘tech-sorry’ (for lack of a better term) individuals will dissipate, but for now we have to continue catering to the majority of the population, all of whom unfortunately are no so good with computers.

  33. I totally hear what you’re saying. While I really appreciate how natural technology seems to be for my 10 year old son I also am sad that he never had the chance to develop the appreciation and understanding for software and technology I have just by being able to take all of this for granted. I still remember the pain and suffering after typing in that code you found in a computer magazine to play some simple ascii car racing game just to find out that somewhere was a mistake and then going through all the checksums to finally get this sensation of satisfaction and the feeling that this is something you’ve done.

    This is what got me into developing and going deeper into coding, electronics and technology. In anticipation to give my son this feeling I’ve stocked up on Arduinos, RaspBerry PIs and such, hoping the day will come that he will develop that interest some day and giving me a chance to share my passion.

    Don’t get me wrong – I really like where technology got us and I think it’s great that we’re at a place where it feels like a natural part of our life, however I also think that people need to learn to understand technology and learn what’s in the box.

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