A Raspberry Pi Christmas

Some people mark milestones of the “Christmas they got a bike,” or “Christmas I got an XBox.” That never mattered to me, particularly. My spoiled self often got those things too, but my real, burning desire was computers.

As a member of GenX, I was fortunate enough to surf the tidal wave of personal computing. From my earliest memory in the mid 1980’s, we had a “keeping up with the Joneses” TI-99x in our household. I remember it having a super-clicky keyboard and playing games on cartridges. But that one wasn’t mine.

From 1984-1986, our family was chasing my father’s obsession with having land, buying a run-down 92-acre farm in Lee County, Kentucky with a ~1000 sq ft house on it. Originally this was going to be a pure remote endeavor, as the farm was 15 minutes west of the only house I’d known. That plan didn’t surive contact with the enemy, so we moved to the farm, to a house with no room for my toys or really half our stuff, period.

Anyway, some lean Birthdays and Christmases followed. I got a card table and chairs for my birthday right after we moved. Christmas was pretty modest that year.

The next year changed all that.

Gateway Drug: The Tandy 1000 EX

DOS 2.11 (we called it ‘miss-dose’ those first few days), a 360k 5 1/4" floppy drive–and an external ‘B’ drive. Only 256k of RAM. A “Tandy 16 color” monitor. These were heady times. I was 10, I think, so this was Christmas of 1988.

The oddity was–it was like a UFO had dropped out of the sky–I had no idea how to use it. DOS 2 was user hostile, and the “Tandy Deskmate” shell wasn’t much better. I don’t particularly remember any specific program with this machine that kept my interest. For a time, it gathered dust, but a procession of games drew me back in. I became a regular user, but chafed at the limitations of the machine itself. I needed more.

Heroin: The Tandy 1000 TL/2

DOS 3, originally. A 12 Mhz 286 processor. A 40 MB HARD DRIVE, meaning I could install things and avoid swapping disks. Real expansion slots. 640k of memory. Tandy EGA graphics AND mulitmedia sound capabilities.

Here’s where you learn how much of a jerk I really am: I nearly cried in frustration when I opened this computer. I devoured every PC buff book out there. I knew the 386SX and full 386 machines were available, and they were “Only $3000, Mom!” That’s what I wanted–a bleeding edge computer, not this also-ran. (For those scoring at home, a “$3k” machine then would be $7,800 in modern money. I was an idiot)

My parents are better people than me. If my child had acted in such a manner, I’d probably have taken the computer, walked to the river adjoining our property, and thrown it in.

Anyway, this was a true “buy your kid a beater car and let him fix it up” scenario. I got a copy of Norton Utilities and tuned and tweaked that machine. I defragged, compressed, used Stacker to increase disk size. Every hack I could make without being an actual programmer, I made. I even learned how to tap on the misbehaving HD to get it to spin again.

My game play exploded. I discovered “Railroad Tycoon” and lost days to building railroads in the virtual world, Microprose’s simulation software like F-15 Strike Eagle, EA’s “LHX”. So much fun.

I also started doing my school work on the machine and got serious about learning to type. My consistend 90+ wpm I owe to that machine and it’s reluctant keyboard.

Today: A Raspberry Pi

From that Christmas as a 12 year old ’til now, I’ve never received a computer of my own for Christmas. I’ve bought them on a needs-based basis, and I’ve been given “daily driver” computers by my employers.

That changed today

I’m typing this on my brand-new 8GB Raspberry Pi, running PiOS 64-bit, inside of VS Code. Everything works so far and I’m thrilled. I’ve had to sudo apt install most of the afternoon to get things ready, including hugo which the publication engine for this blog.

Honestly, I haven’t been this giddy about a computer probably since I got real with that Tandy 1000 TL/2 back in the day. It’s so….raw. General experience so far:

• Getting the board itself into the enclosure was trival. Finding where to plug-in the cooling fan was not
• Initial set-up booted into a 32-bit version of the OS, which was a no-go. In particular, Signal won’t even install on a 32-bit Linux these days.
• I removed the SD card and installed a 64-bit version onto it using ‘Pi Imager’. This is the only part of the process that required using another computer.
• I tried installing Zed, my new editor I’ve been using, but it seemed to crash the frame buffer in GNOME. So, I downshifted to using VSCode. That’s a comfortable editor for me anyway.
• I continue to apt install as needed and it’s been working: Ruby, hugo, etc.

I don’t really have a feel for the distribution itself, but it feels like a barebones debian which seems perfect for a hobbyist application.

My goal is to get a light NAS solution and completely remove any personal stuff off my work computer. I could just get a simple external drive and attach it directly–probably my first step.

Oh. And I’ve installed dosbox and already played “Civilization”. “Railroad Tycoon” may be next!