When studying GCSE IT at school, the first chance for me to use a computer at school, the first programming centric software used was Winlogo. A simple drawing application that used code to manipulate a turtle (yes, I kid you not) to create vector shapes on a screen. Basically an overly complicated version of paint.

I used Winlogo on the at then school standard Acorn A3020, a RISC based 12mhz processor machine, with my final project code taking a full 3 minutes to run on. Luckily at the time I just got the internet at home and managed to obtain a copy of Winlogo for my first home PC. Running on an AMD K5 133mhz the same project code ran in mere seconds.

And this comparison is where I think my love for the Raspberry Pi came about, even though I had the ability to create something that ran quickly and get the same results. I preferred running it on a slower machine as it felt that my work had more prominence, taking up many more processor cycles on the older machine than new. Plus watching my code run at a pace I could read and understand helped me relate to it and establish what I was doing and, in the case of Winlogo where I went wrong, seeing which vector took the wrong path as it happened on the A3020 rather than trying to fathom out from the final scribbled mess that my PC displayed.

I relate this to the current methods of computing I have, if I want a new system to learn like Debian, I could easily create a Virtual Machine on my laptop or launch an instance on Amazon EC2. But I have been drawn to the Raspberry Pi firstly due to it being a physical machine, like the A3020 used in the past, even though it was not the fastest or superior machine available I could manipulate it to use its entire capacity on what I choose. And the slowly scrolling status messages help me to understand what’s going on when I type in commands, essentially helping my learn better.

Not sure if this post places the RPi in a positive light, or myself for that matter,  but it is a great learning tool.