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A single-board command-line computer using the esp32. Look at it! It's cute. Can't buy it yet the creator is starting some kind of online commune for single-board computer freaks. I bet some of you are around here, go say hi at his forum it only has like two posts and its making me sad.
I don't know why I'm so attracted to little computers like this. Maybe it's the retro futurism? Maybe it's the prospect of understanding how every component in my computer works for a few beautiful moments in the day.
Maybe it's thinking about how fun it'd be to text secret messages with a little cyberpunk looking card.
Anyway, if you have ever wanted to make something like this know you will have fans. You don't need to explain why... just make it!
@futurebird reminds me of pagers back in high school
@futurebird because some day they will become small enough to be used by ants.
@futurebird One of the attractions of old home/hobbyist-oriented computers to me was that in those days, the idea of programming the machine was always very prominently featured. Maybe just as a way to sell them to parents as more than just video game consoles. Maybe because the productivity applications they had were not very powerful and programming was one of the few things you really could do. But they made it easy to get started, and it got a generation of kids into it.
Modern machines like the Raspberry Pi do have some of that emphasis.
There were negative sides of this. I've heard that this contributed to women actually being pushed out of computer science and software engineering, since these computers tended to be marketed to boys (largely through their video-game aspect), and in the 1980s the pernicious idea developed that you weren't going to make it in the field unless you were a "whiz kid" with youthful coding experience at home.
@futurebird
I read twostopbits partially for this reason: simple systems that can be understood. The other reason is nostalgia.
@faassen @futurebird
Went there and followed a link to this gem:
"The basic maze generating routine had been partially written by a stoner who had left. I contacted him to try and understand what the maze generating algorithm did. He told me it came upon him when he was drunk and whacked out of his brain, he coded it up in assembly overnight before he passed out, but now could not for the life of him remember how the algorithm worked."
https://www.techspot.com/news/85622-nobody-sure-what-makes-atari-2600-game-entombed.html
@RealGene @faassen @futurebird From reading the article we know at one level how the algorithm worked: it is a cellular automaton, similar to Conway's game of Life, with an element of randomness thrown in. But what we don't know is how the guy came up with the idea of which five cells are relevant (which neighbors look at, "like a Tetris piece"), and how did he come up with the table? There are way too many possibilities to try them all, or even a significant percentage. The pot must have given him amazing intuition.
Another article said the "stoner" angle was apocryphal, basically just trying to obscure the origin of the IP...
@not2b @RealGene @faassen @futurebird oh i didn't see the article. does it list the code? u say it's a cellular automaton? something like wolfram rule 30 could construct something like this. no random input needed.
@barrygoldman1 @RealGene @faassen @futurebird Without randomness the maze would be the same every time.
@not2b @RealGene @faassen @futurebird oh yeah thats true
@RealGene @faassen @futurebird This is a spectacular story! Up there with "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_of_Mel
@futurebird I like small computers, whether modern or retro, when they are simple enough for a single person to understand and program directly at the hardware level.
Maybe it's the impending dread of knowing that every single device you currently own is tracking you and reporting to unknown people for the nefarious purposes of controlling your everyday life, so your lizard brain is shouting "you need a way of organising the resistance without giving away your position"?
-Sent from my iPhoney.
I love my gaming computer, but I'd love a similar box that has a smaller footprint to fit better on my tiny desk. I love small puters.
@futurebird It’s a shame the m5stack Cardputer community is full of Flipper Zero nerds and not graphical calculator nerds