I started with a TI-99/4a back in 1983 at six years old; I've forgotten most of what I learned as a child tinkering with BASIC and later with DOS/Windows machines. I learned early on that programming wasn't for me, but I love hardware hacking and use those skills daily.
> I know the raspberry pie and stuff are a way to do that, but it feels so artificial and fake.
The Raspberry Pi came about as the result of obscure, unsupported, difficult to grok dev boards that polluted the landscape. With the release of the Pi, suddenly we had a dev board that had a maintained and supported Linux distro, GPIO that was thoroughly and correctly documented, and a community that actually cared about the device. Fast forward five years and it has stayed the dominant "consumer developer" device because it has opened up more and more, while still being 100% supported by its makers rather than closed and abandoned after every minor revision (looking at you, Hardkernel).
If anything, the RPi has revitalized programming as an educational path for young children, and I applaud them for that.
The BeagleBoard and BeagleBone predated the Raspberry Pi, and those were well documented and supported. They're actually better documented because they don't depend on proprietary Broadcom firmware to boot (a Free software replacement is in development but not yet usable for most people). The Raspberry Pi was more successful mostly because it was so much cheaper.
Yep, I was close to buying a BeagleBoard when the RPi was announced, and I went with the Pi instead. At the time, the BeagleBoard was the more powerful and entrenched option, and it was fine for experts, but it was a non-starter for beginners. That's the magic formula the RPi Foundation put together: Cheap (basically loss-leader), easy to understand and bootstrap, and fully supported by the creators.
I get that the Pi is looked down upon by some because of the closed nature of its GPU, but most of the other SBC/SoC manufacturers are also releasing closed source boards and some are even violating the GPL. I believe Bunnie Huang's Novena is the only 100% open source (hardware and software) dev board on the market today.
> I know the raspberry pie and stuff are a way to do that, but it feels so artificial and fake.
The Raspberry Pi came about as the result of obscure, unsupported, difficult to grok dev boards that polluted the landscape. With the release of the Pi, suddenly we had a dev board that had a maintained and supported Linux distro, GPIO that was thoroughly and correctly documented, and a community that actually cared about the device. Fast forward five years and it has stayed the dominant "consumer developer" device because it has opened up more and more, while still being 100% supported by its makers rather than closed and abandoned after every minor revision (looking at you, Hardkernel).
If anything, the RPi has revitalized programming as an educational path for young children, and I applaud them for that.