Charlie Stross
@cstross@wandering.shop  ·  activity timestamp 2 weeks ago
@swelljoe @mos_8502 The nearest thing to that currently in existence is the Raspberry Pi—which, with 68 million units sold, *is* on that kind of scale. Except each new iPhone generation outsells it by more than an order of magnitude.

People who actually want a personal computer they can program are a niche market, albeit vastly larger than in 1982. And it's a good thing they exist, because most users of modern CPUs have no idea or interest whatsoever—it's just a phone to them.
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@peterrenshaw@ioc.exchange  ·  activity timestamp 3 days ago
@cstross “People who actually want a personal computer they can program are a niche market, albeit vastly larger than in 1982”

The roots of the #Mega65 lay in #CS #education with #students not being able to grasp the basics not because of lack of intelligence, but through the lack of exposure to basic computing hardware.

“By insulating new computer science and IT students from how computers really work, we may well be disadvantaging them, by preventing them from learning how a computer really works. It's quite the same idea as starting a mechanic on a simple old car, instead of on a nuclear submarine: make the important details visible so that they can be learnt.” — Paul Gardner-Stephen

<https://c65gs.blogspot.com/2015/12/is-this-first-academic-slide.html>

@swelljoe @mos_8502