An old friend of mine just gave me a Raspberry Pi. It is so cool!
When I opened the box, CVH asked “What is it?”
“A Raspberry Pi.”
“What’s that?”
“A computer.”
“An old-timey computer, or a new computer?”
“A brand new computer. The latest version.”
“A toy, then.”
“Yes.”
After I got it connected and booted up, I was amazed at what the little critter could do. I thought, “If we only had toys like this when I was a kid, instead of the plastic crap that we did, who knows how I might have turned out?”
That evening, I watched a great sci-fi film from 1936, “Things to Come” (screenplay by H.G. Wells). At the beginning of the movie, which is set at Christmas 1936, an old grandpa character looks at a tin horse that one of the children has received, and exclaims, “These toys today are so much more intricate and complicated than the toys we had when I was a child.” I thought there’s a difference between a carved wooden horse and a mechanical tin horse, and an entirely different difference between a tin horse and a Raspberry Pi! We can’t even begin to imagine what our grand-children’s toys are going to look like.
