The first computer I touched, and I'm not that old, had 1kb RAM (ZX81) so the pico is a supercomputer next to that. It has all happened gradually but in a way I feel a little bit sorry for the whippersnappers that haven't experienced the incredible advancements. Looking back is different to remembering how one looked forward and how the actuality beat one's wildest dreams.

There are still older people than me who experienced an even steeper curve but I hope that my daughter will enjoy the same thing - to live in a massively better world than the one she started in.

It's not better in the human ways - still lots of fighting and evil - but it's great to be able to stay in touch with one's family over huge distances and to be able to make boredom vanish at the touch of a button, to want to fix something and instantly get 100 videos of how to do it. To find some bit of code extremely boring to write and to get a machine to write it.

This port of Fuzix to the Pico was done by David Given. In 2021 he also screen-recorded and narrated basically his entire effort porting Fuzix to similarly-sized ESP8266. Really very interesting if you are in to that sort of thing!

https://cowlark.com/2021-02-09-esp8266-fuzix/index.html

Very cool, happy to find out about Fuzix running on these dirt cheap SoCs (I paid 0.57€ per RP2040-Zero clone earlier this year!) And someone is even working on adding TCP/IP. I’m assuming there’s no memory protection between processes due to no MMU. It would be great to be able to use the USB port for the serial connection instead of having to connect pins for a serial port connection.

There’s also https://github.com/tvlad1234/pico-rv32ima for people who are into this kind of stuff, but it requires adding SPI RAM.

Fuzix came preintalled as one of the options on my ClockworkPi PicoCalc, which has really been the most fun iteration of the Pico that I've played with yet. I've also been enjoying uLisp and MMBasic on it. The keyboard is quite good.

The Pico series is, IMO, the truest implementation of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s broader goal to make physical computing accessible to education. I am so glad that this is now such a major focus for both the foundation and the trading company (a pivot that was accelerated by the pandemic chip shortage)

The RP2350 is an awesome device but hypothetically it feels like the next one is where things will really kick off, because there likely won’t be a 90s computer it can’t emulate, and it feels clear from what Eben Upton says that retrocomputing, historical device education and simple 90s-style computing environments are part of the picture, and that absolutely dirt-cheap simplified modern “home computer” environments on these devices could have value to them.

Thanks for this writeup, I'm going to try myself as I have a few Raspberry Pi Picos laying around myself. I'm going to try to create a Google Colab Notebook for my virtual environment instead.

2350 have better flashing system

+1 to simple machines.

As an analogy and anecdote, I've learned a lot about cars through RC racing as a teen. Building differentials, CVDs and Universal Joints, hydraulic shocks towers, and tuning radios really gave me the baseline to know and fix cars as an adult.

I still lack a very basic understanding of computers which has somewhat neutered what I'm capable of doing today. I'm now sorta getting back into learning these things but it's kinda hard when it is limited to weekends and holidays. I hope RPI keeps going with their vision as a publicly traded company. Kids need to learn these things.

It has very few RAM to emulate PC's/higher end Classic Macs. You understimate 90's computing. A Pentium 2@333MHZ or a P3 at 500 MHZ was a beast and an RP2350 can't do nil. Maybe some very early computers like the Amiga and the m68k Macs could be emulated under it.

You can play DivX movies under a Pentium II. And a Pentium III at 600 can run Icewm, modern dillo, TLS 1.3... with ease, even post into HN.