[lmm]

Learning what? How to program the kind of machine that's already been obsolete for 10 years?

I know a couple of people with RPis who are using them as "home server"-type devices. Those are useful, and more power certainly doesn't hurt. Whereas the people I know who bought them with some idea that they would "start hardware hacking" or some such sit there gathering dust.

[gaius]

Learning how hardware actually works. I learnt on the BBC Micro, a 32k machine running at 2Mhz, powerful enough to run interesting things, simple enough that you could understand exactly how it worked, the memory map, how IO actually happened, etc. A serial port is great for this; USB or Ethernet, not so much.

[ams6110]

Yes, for learning, simple can be better. Years ago as a teen my understanding of the basics of assembly and machine language and how CPUs worked finally "clicked" when I was playing with a very simple software simulation of a 4-bit microprocessor. I think it was called "picoprocessor" or something close to that. While useless as a practical architecture, the concepts I learned in that simplified environment were then easy to apply to real-world systems.

[weland]

> Learning what? How to program the kind of machine that's already been obsolete for 10 years?

The RPi really is a very powerful platform. It's not a desktop computer. There are real-world devices that run things far more complex on far slower hardware.