Its an interesting rant. I've maintained for a while that the amount of encumberances in a modern SoC exceed their value for all but a few. But here is the thing, you could still go out and build a CP/M machine, yes Z80's are still for sale [1], you can't really build a floppy disk controller these days but you can simulate one with MMC/SD cards. But the question which is not well specified is what are you trying to teach?
The typical computer science curriculum from the 80's involved learning programming with PASCAL or C, a bit of Assembly, then Compiler Design and Data Structures, followed by Data bases, operating systems, and if you were lucky distributed systems. Along with a healthy portion of set theory, complexity analysis, algorithms, and logic.
The key is that very little of the typical Computer Science degree involved actually writing a device driver or looking at the code of one. It was more about what the role of a device driver was in abstracting what hardware could do into easily used function calls or object methods.
If there was a cheap 'terminal' you could do most of that with a very inexpensive board (even a soft-CPU if you wanted). I've been working intermittently on exactly such a system, perhaps the next time I take a break from working full time I'll finish it, I doubt the development of such a system would be particularly profitable (even as a 'lifestyle' business).
But the point of this response is that to rant effectively you need to state the problem, and I don't think the author here does that, what learning is prevented by the restrictions on the Pi? What percentage of all the learning you might do is that? Who is effected? None of those questions are explored. I really liked Limor's response (LadyAda) which went to the things you could do rather than focus on what you could not do.
The typical computer science curriculum from the 80's involved learning programming with PASCAL or C, a bit of Assembly, then Compiler Design and Data Structures, followed by Data bases, operating systems, and if you were lucky distributed systems. Along with a healthy portion of set theory, complexity analysis, algorithms, and logic.
The key is that very little of the typical Computer Science degree involved actually writing a device driver or looking at the code of one. It was more about what the role of a device driver was in abstracting what hardware could do into easily used function calls or object methods.
If there was a cheap 'terminal' you could do most of that with a very inexpensive board (even a soft-CPU if you wanted). I've been working intermittently on exactly such a system, perhaps the next time I take a break from working full time I'll finish it, I doubt the development of such a system would be particularly profitable (even as a 'lifestyle' business).
But the point of this response is that to rant effectively you need to state the problem, and I don't think the author here does that, what learning is prevented by the restrictions on the Pi? What percentage of all the learning you might do is that? Who is effected? None of those questions are explored. I really liked Limor's response (LadyAda) which went to the things you could do rather than focus on what you could not do.
[1] http://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/Z84C0006PEG/269-389...