As a result of unexpected demand and a few unexpected glitches in the far east it took about two and a half months for my Raspberry Pi to arrive and become yet another piece of hardware that seemed a good idea at the time. However, the question does arrive: what do I do with it now?
Give it credit where it's due, it's an amazing feat to create a functioning caseless PC in such a size and for such a cost. It was never designed for people like me: a magpie-eyed technological-dilettante who never got beyond swapping PCI cards. Just how do you hold it without touching human-static fragile components?
So I'm a bit left in limbo while people who it is designed at work out what to do with it. Yes, there are some wonderful ideas coming through, but I'm limited by time, experience and talent from doing anything cutting edge with this cutting edge tech.
From the perspective of my living room, I'm feeling a bit like this infamous story from 1970s California where an early computer - the Altair - was the subject of much wonder and interest - but nobody could actually make it do anything useful
"Steve Dumpier set up an Altair, and laboriously keyed a program into it. Somebody knocked a plug out of the wall and he had to do that all over again but nobody knew what this was about. After all, was it just going to sit and flash its lights? No....
You put a little eh transistor radio next to the Altair and he would by manipulating the length of loops in the sofware - could play tunes....
The radio began playing 'Fool on the Hill'....Da da da, da da da....and the tinny little tunes that you could tell were coming from the noise that the computer was generated being picked up by the radio. Everybody rose and applauded. ... I proposed that he receive the stripped Philips Screw Award for finding a use for something previously thought useless. But I think everybody was too busy applauding to even hear me."
From Triumph of the Nerds PBS 2006 episode 1 : (Transcript)
