A raspberry pi is $25 and far exceeds the home computer of the 80s and most of the home computers sold in the 90s.
People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
People pay more because they want more. If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
But what Moore's law giveth, web developers taketh away. If you want to use a computer to participate in the modern society, you need much more than a Raspberry Pi, due to web bloat.
There are many things consumers are willing to pay for with their time and patience, but not their cash. As it turns out many of those things are web "services". If they were truly valuable on the same level as say, food, people would gladly pay cash for the service.
YouTube is a great example for me personally. If you told me I had to pay a monthly subscription of $10, I'd stop watching YouTube instantly. But since it's "free" I'll sit through a few ads. I don't mind paying with my time.
Plenty of people still write travel blogs and think pieces without getting a salary for it. The thing that drives me crazy is twitter / facebook etc showing me content produced for free and STILL put it next to an ad.
It's free to produce -- but it costs to run a huge network of Twitter scale to post it
That said, I think I'd be perfectly happy if most websites went under. What we're getting out of it (novelty, entertainment) isn't worth the cost (attention span, loss of privacy) in most cases.
Although, I think a rPI is capable, even if it would be frustratingly slow.
The World Wide Web would be a much better place if web developers/designers showed even the slightest bit of restraint when it comes to shoving arbitrary Turing-complete code down my throat. Statistically-speaking, 95+% of it doesn't benefit me in the slightest, and there's a special place in hell for those who write websites such that I have to put up with that 95% that's garbage just to use the site at all.
Loading 10 or 20 or even 1000 140-character tweets should be possible even on an old DOS PC with dialup, and yet even 10-year-old PCs with multiple orders of magnitude more processing power and network speed/bandwidth struggle with that.
Most of those sites are incredibly bloated. Even bank dashboards have become increasingly heavy (for near zero value added).
That would be relevant if the metric was "cpu power of computer sold in the 80s".
There were some $100 (or even $25) pieces of hardware far more powerful than ENIAC in 1980 as well.
But the relevant metric is "cpu power appropriate for contemporary uses and programs" -- and in 2018 it means what people in 2018 consider a home computer.
>If your goal is just learning how computers work, you have far cheaper options today.
Why would that be your goal? That's only of interest to programmers and tinkerers, not 95% of the population.
The 6502 (available even earlier than 1980) cost $25 -- and was used (e.g. in C64 well into the mid-80s and even today).
ENIAC 0.00289 MIPS
Commodore 64 0.02 MIPS
The pi is a whole computer built around a SoC. The 6502 is a CPU only. This $25 claim seems questionable.
" If your goal is just to work on computers, you have far cheaper options today. "
1 of my 2 desktops at work is a 2006 mac mini g-7450. it can email. and view pdfs and edit office documents. it has ten-four fox. and it can ssh. yeah. mostly email and ssh...