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.
