Hi!
Just curious about what people were planning on using their Raspberry Pi's for once they started getting them!??
Current plan- SFF Media PC / NAS etc mounted onto the VESA on the back of my TV
Later plan- Replace car stereo etc with RPi
Probably not the most origional use there but still, godda start somewhere!
It's a gathering of old-timers here. You too probably remember reading code by holding up paper tape to the light. 
The Pi founders talk about the BBC Micro like it were the dawn of computing, but really they were 2nd or 3rd generation, just users of consumer gadgets with all the rough edges smoothed off for public consumption. The hardcore technical work came before that.
Programming in Python won't really tell youngsters much about their machinery, although hopefully it will get them interested in technology in general, so it could be a stepping stone away from consumerism and towards better understanding. I hope so.
Morgaine.
Picture of part of a core plane from a scrapped display system that I kept. Few bits there!
Haha, nice. I guess I'm a newbie compared to that, but I did possess a 64 KB hard drive (yes, Kilo) ex PDP-7, and I still have a pile of those old DECtape cases which I use for component storage. Oh and I preserved a 2MB RK07 removeable disk pack for posterity, just because it was reputed to be the base model for Hans Solo's Millennium Falcon. 
From a slightly more modern vintage, one of my main racks here is from a PDP-11/34. I'm so sad that I didn't grab the old PDP-11/20's binary toggle switches when the machine was thrown away, on which I'd entered the bootstrap code from memory so many hundreds or thousands of times. I'm not really much into memorabilia that isn't functional, but the switch panel could have been interfaced nicely to an ARM Cortex to make a pretty unique UI for binary-aware techies. 
Morgaine.
When I moved from New Jersey (where I had a basement) to Texas, I had to leave behind a lot of equipment. I worked for several years with the company that ran one of the original NSFNet regional networks, JVNCNet that was build around the Princeton University and the John Von Neumann supercomputer center, after the center closed we inhireted a lot of stuff.
Some PDP-11 19" racks ended in my basement to mount part of the equipment I used for R&D in large scale networking and other stuff, in front of the racks shown in the picture I had a running PDP-11 and a Microvax, can't find where I put a picture of that one.
-J
@jamodio: Yup, same rack system, except that mine has an ornamental head section and I still have the slot-in side covers on mine which you've removed there. Awesomely strong hardware, built to last forever unlike some modern racks.
I was so sad when DEC were purchased by Compaq, a mere PC company. I knew it was the beginning of the end for their professional quality hardware. 
Morgaine Dinova wrote:
It's a gathering of old-timers here. You too probably remember reading code by holding up paper tape to the light.
We mostly had pink paper tape, so you didn't need to hold it up to the light like black paper tape. Yellow paper tape had an icky color IMO.
For one class, we had limited access to a shared PDP-11/20, so I entered the first draft of my PDP-11 ASM programs using an off-line ASR-38 teletype, punching the program directly onto paper tape. You had to type carefully because it had limited back-space capability. If you made a mistake, you pushed the punch's backspace button one or more times and then typed one or more DEL characters, which as you all know from the ASCII chart is all ones. This told the paper tape reader to ignore the deleted characters. Then I transferred my program on DECtape and fixed the remainng typos and made other modifications with a text editor.
Everybody else in the class used punched cards. However, the card reader was flaky, so when it was down I got extra access to the PDP-11 :-) Using the ASR-38 allowed me write lower case comments. This was considered heresy and made me an outcast among outcasts :-)
Pink paper tape, oh my.:
Never seen that before, ours was drab white, or slightly off-white.
I wonder how we'd have reacted back then to someone telling us we'd be using terabyte drives and 4GHz processors by 2010. And 32-bit microcontrollers for 50p in a washing machine ... although we'd have to explain "microcontroller" first. 
Pink paper tape, oh my.: Never seen that before, ours was drab white, or slightly off-white.
I wonder how we'd have reacted back then to someone telling us we'd be using terabyte drives and 4GHz processors by 2010. And 32-bit microcontrollers for 50p in a washing machine ... although we'd have to explain "microcontroller" first.
""I believe that one of the problems, given how software development has evolved, young programmers today got used to just glue APIs together, the "black magic" of trying to fit a particular set of algorithms in 2KB of ROM got lost in the bloated amount of resources contemporary hardware provides.""
yes, in those days these computers that has ferite core memories there was no reset or reboot button. Even if you pulled the plug the computer stops and when you applied power back to it.... well it resumed exactly where it left off.
so if your program was suicidal or wrote over itself you had to rekey it entirely, one word at a time with the switches 
.
after 2 or 3 tries, then one's tend to debug his/her program.
