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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

Even Raspberry Pi is an overkill. Look at with what we did tasks in 90's and we had it all good. Now look at RPi3 specs for example.

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I see people complain about the low power of the Pi3...then I think about how I went through college with a slower computer than that, and how the people over the previous 30 years had even slower machines to use (if they had their own personal machine at all).

What you can do with a couple MHz and a few hundred KB of memory is great, given a little ingenuity. Of course, you aren't going to do real-time face recognition on something like that, but 99% of what we need to do is just fine with 0.1% of the performance.

Or the Arduino versus what we had with our 8-bit computers.

I came to realize that Raspberry Pi would be a "supercomputer" to run Xerox PARC, ETHZ and DEC research OSes.

So if we are still playing catch up with those environments, is just because the industry at large lacks the political agenda to push forward such technologies, and nothing to do with technical capabilities.

I wonder what would happen if we could build a time machine and send a bunch of RPis back in time to Silicon Valley in the 1970s, along with all the specs for how to build more of them (though this would be a lot of information since it requires fairly modern semiconductor manufacturing processes).

At the very least, the Raspberry Pi has a much lower power footprint, so even it's overkill, it's still probably better than a C64, at least in this one particular case.

That said, I think the C64 thing is pretty neat, so I can't really knock it.

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