One Christmas in the 1980s when I was growing up, my parents brought home an amazing gift: a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A home computer. This computer had a built-in keyboard and a cartridge slot for software (mostly games); you could write programs in BASIC, and save these programs and data to tape with a household cassette recorder. For a display, you could screw some connectors down to the back of your family's color TV set. It came with all of 16K of memory (enough to hold over 100 tweets! or several emoji! or almost 4 copies of this essay!).
I learned to program with it, figuring out basics of animation, sound, and numerical computation. I played a lot of charming arcade-style games on it. We hooked up a printer, and we found a painful text editor to use with it; if only we had something as capable as Windows Notepad!
There are lots of bad things I could say about the TI-99/4A, and I loved the thing. My family moved on to other computers, but I still love the idea of a cheap computer you could plug into the family TV.
Today, there are several cheap small computers originally designed for education, but which have been adopted by numerous hobbyists and hackers. I'm most inspired by the Raspberry Pi, which has wide support. This fanless single-board computer is about as big as a deck of cards, built around a smart phone CPU, and typically does not even come with a case, power supply, storage (a flash memory card), or keyboard. The computer itself costs about $35; but add on that other stuff and it comes to about $70. You can buy a monitor for it at about $100, or (wait for it...) you can hook it up to the family TV (yes!). And you can download a full 32-bit windowed OS (some form of Linux) and lots of other software for FREE! Forget BASIC; with this, you can program in C, Java, Perl, and Python!
It sounds great, right? I mean, I'm sure it is great. But I don't have one. It's been observed that Linux is not free-as-in-free-beer, but free-as-in-free-puppies: yes, the price tag is low, but the time required is high. If this thing takes me more than 2 hours to fiddle with (with no end in sight), I'm worried that I will have to abandon it, and it will sit in a box of wires and gather dust, like my many other projects I started and then gave up on. My budget is too limited for that, I don't have that much spare time, and I'm at the age where I don't know if I can handle the prospect of another failed hobby haunting me. Ideally I'd like to hire a 14-year-old (someone I could pay in CD money, or Pokemon money, or whatever kids spend money on now, as long as it's not drugs) to do the purchasing, downloading, configuring, and testing of this thing, and then I could just hook it up and switch it on when I want to play an MP3 through my stereo, or a YouTube video on my TV.
Well, I don't have kids of my own; that's poor planning on my part. A neighbor just had a baby, but even with the great parenting I'm sure it will receive, I suspect it will be more than a decade before I can expect Linux skills out of it. I might have seen flyers for baby sitters at the coffee shop, but I definitely never saw any for system administrators. Also, I'm concerned about possibly violating the child labor laws.
What I really want is to give this thing to myself back in the 1980s. And that's the real tragedy of the fact that kids today have way better toys: I have the money to buy the toys, but I can't play with them like I used to. Because that's all I'd really be doing with this gadget: playing with it, just like I used to play with that 16K home computer, experimenting with BASIC code for hours and hours. I work and I exercise and I try to create art (if this blog can be considered art), and if I have a spare hour today, I'd much rather spend it as quality time with my family than twiddling bits all alone. Would I be wasting my life, wasting what little youth I have left if I did anything else?
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