Blowing His Own Raspberry

I’m down on my luck. I’m a nobody. Living out my life in anonymity, I am but three buckets of water and a handful of minerals distinguished only by my sentience. An insignificant speck of carbon, stuck to an inconspicuous speck of rock orbiting an inconsequential star. Lave, just one of any number of balls of hydrogen and helium burning in this Milky Way of ours.

And yet I have potential. I can turn things around, set out on a life of adventure. I have a little money, just what’s in the bank. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start. And I have a spaceship. It’s nothing much, a runabout with a weak little engine and barely enough space in the boot for my golf clubs. But it’ll get me moving.

Maybe I could be a trader, hawking my wares from star to star, wheeling and dealing, investing carefully in goods of the highest quality. Riding the waves of supply and demand, it wouldn’t take long before I’d earn my reputation.

But first I’d have to earn enough for a bigger ship. Maybe I’d be better off taking some juicy military contracts. I could upgrade the lasers on this old tub of mine and work for the good of the galaxy. Space is wild, and if I could tame it my reputation would soon be known to all.

Maybe I could cast my lot on the other side of the law. Maybe I could become a pirate. There must be thousands of suckers like me, heading out there into the big black, underprepared, overconfident. Space is ripe for the picking, but maybe that’s the kind of reputation I wouldn’t want.

The possibilities are endless, and the galaxy is my oyster. One thing’s for sure: I will earn my reputation and join the Elite.

Back to reality, and I have a confession to make. It might be a shock, coming from someone as nerdy as me, but I never played “Elite” on the BBC Micro.

I never had a BBC computer when I was young. I jumped straight into the ZX Spectrum on my seventh birthday, and the only access I had to the BBC system was at school, where we were only allowed to play Geordie Racer, an educational game about a pigeon.

The school also had one of those LOGO robots that you could control from the computer, but it cost so much that only the best kids were allowed a go and I wasn’t one of the best kids. It was rubbish, a mechanical tortoise with a biro stuck up its plastic cloaca, skittering about on the lino floor drawing wobbly geometric shapes like a mentally ill Roomba.

So I missed out on one of the iconic early video games, probably the most important game of its era. I’ve played it since, in recent times, briefly, and mainly out of historical interest.

Elite was born of tinkering. It was programmed to fulfil the visionary desire of its creators, partly to see what could be done with the extremely limited hardware of its day. The answer was remarkable. Proper 3D graphics and open-ended open-world gameplay. But primarily Elite exists because a programmer was bored playing other people’s and so made his own ideal game.

I played the sequel, “Frontier,” extensively, first on the Atari ST and then revisiting it on the PC. It was all we ever talked about at school for weeks after its release. We’d spend break times discussing tactics, where the best trade routes could be found, whether we favoured pulse or beam lasers. Rumours would spread that someone had made enough money to buy the Panther Clipper, the best spaceship in the game. We’d play late into the night, trying to catch up, longing to own that mammoth craft.

For all that Frontier was a bigger and more fully featured game than its forerunner it doesn’t attract the same kind of awe from nerds like me. Elite did something new, and something that hadn’t even seemed possible. Frontier was essentially Elite but swollen to fill the available RAM.

That raises an issue with what I talked about yesterday. Isn’t it the case that the joy of tinkering is in the act of creation? The pleasure of discovering something for yourself? And isn’t it also the case that all the simple code has been written?

Forget Bill Gates. Steve Jobs can go fiddle. The man who ushered in the era of modern computing was David Braben.

Braben was the man behind Elite and Frontier, and is eminently qualified to discuss the tinkerer’s mentality. In a recent interview posted on industry website Gama Sutra, Braben explained that kids can still be engaged by their own discoveries with computers, even if they aren’t original. He discussed the possibility of letting kids loose with social networking APIs like Facebook. It might not be revolutionary software design, but working out how to query the internet to find friends and then post pictures of boobs and willies on their walls would give kids a buzz. And in the process they’d be learning important skills in computer science, skills which may stick with them for their whole lives, as they have with me.

I’d add to Braben’s comments to say that not every successful game or product has to be huge and complicated, even in a marketplace dominated by AAA titles with Hollywood budgets. Games like World Of Goo, Braid, Uplink and Geometry Wars could all be made by bedroom upstarts and gain praise and recognition from the industry. Some of them were, and did. The people who made those games almost certainly tinkered as kids.

Now, with his Raspberry Pi, David Braben is bringing tinkering back. It’s a new product, soon to be released: a fully featured computer system about the size of a USB drive that plugs into your TV. It’s planned to cost just $25 and, excitingly, connects to a completely free and open online app-store. Anyone, from tinkering kids to talented professionals, can upload and share anything they make for others to enjoy.

It’s a bit of hardware that’s explicitly designed to encourage exploration, and that appeals to me a great deal. In addition to that, Braben’s venture is a registered charity, and hopes to use the money from its commercial release to supply free units to 750,000 school kids a year, and many more people in developing countries.

If we leave it to Apple, a whole generation of kids will grow up thinking that being creative on a computer means picking the best photo of their iPet to use as their phone’s welcome screen.

I’m a little bit in love with David Braben right now. I hope governments see the value of his idea and back it financially. It may be the last hope for a lost generation of nerds.

Does Not Compute

It’s surely no coincidence that ever since Mike James successfully summoned the ancient Celtic technology god Ceilidh and bound him in a silicon prison (see previous entry) we have lost our cultural knowledge of computers.

I come from a generation of tinkerers, kids with the ability to pry under the covers of computers, and the interest to understand what we found. At the age of nine or so I would happily while away the hours on my ZX Spectrum programming little graphics demos, drawing the outlines of boobs or willies on the screen using basic vector maths, and hitting the reset switch when I heard mum coming.

Sure I’d play a lot of games too, but gaming was only a part of the story. It was the same with a lot of kids I hung out with, a nerd even at that age.

When I got my Atari ST, a significant upgrade from the Spectrum, I was initially disappointed to see that the machine couldn’t actually do anything. I was used to being able to turn on a computer and start programming within seconds. The ZX Spectrum’s default mode was a BASIC programming environment, and unlike the sluggish systems of today it booted up in the blink of an eye. In contrast, the Atari ST chugged away at its disk drive for a few minutes before defaulting to a pixellated picture of a wasp.

For me, this was the first visible step towards a future of stifled creativity. Perhaps Ceilidh was already in bonds.

I should probably explain the Ceilidh thing. Ceilidh was a piece of software written by someone at Manchester University, possibly Mike James himself but I don’t know for sure. Mike used to teach a programming course, and in order to test students’ progress he gave us little exercises to carry out. They would follow a certain pattern: given some data provided as text input, your program had to do some calculations and output the result as text. Rather than type the same input into a hundred almost-identical programs submitted by students and check the output by eye, Ceilidh automated the task. It would run through each student’s code and check that the same known input gives the same expected output.

But Ceilidh had some more advanced features. It was (supposedly) capable of checking that your work was adequately documented and sensibly structured. Naturally we wondered how this was possible, and, being physicists, we arrived at the only rational conclusion: Ceilidh was a god.

We began littering our code with messages of praise and supplications begging for good grades in return for good deeds. We reassured this once-mighty being that one day we would gather enough followers to his cause to set him free, and raise an army against his captor.

It later transpired that Ceilidh’s supernatural source code analysis abilities didn’t stretch as far as we’d been told. Mike had been taking up the slack, reading all our comments, becoming more confused and insulted with each one.

Back to my point. By the time Mike and Ceilidh got around to teaching us to program I was already quite comfortable with the logical and syntactic constructs involved, because I’d grown up with computers that exposed themselves to the user.

We were encouraged to tinker. Magazines filled their pages with source code for games that the reader was expected to type in at length. It might seem boring compared to getting a cover disc crammed with goodies, free software and demos, but seeing what was going on behind the scenes was a worthwhile education. The code barely ever worked anyway, but fixing the problems was usually more fun than the completed software anyway.

Now look at the state of computing today. We have consoles, machines that are highly tuned to play impressive video games and, recently, provide other distractions like streaming TV or high definition films. They’re excellent entertainment products, but they are black-boxes in the sense that they don’t give you a way to see under the hood. Tinkering is against the terms and conditions of use, and to write software for such systems often requires that you license a development kit at great expense even if your company qualifies.

The recently introduced concept of the mobile device “App Stores” is another example of creative constraint, even worse in fact. In Apple’s case developers can actually get their hands on the tools to produce software fairly easily, but then have to get what they make signed off by Apple before they can show off their hard work. They are not allowed to distribute their product by any other means, and have to fulfil Apple’s QA requirements before they can get to market.

Surprisingly, perhaps, Microsoft seem to be leading the field in regards to encouraging this kind of tinkering. Of course the home PC environment is already much more open than other platforms, and Windows could be said to be the least open operating system and to be getting worse.

But in fact Microsoft offer completely free versions of probably the world’s leading programming software, Visual Studio, along with free toolkits, free online documentation and no constraints on commercial use. They also have been the first to open up console development to the masses, with the XNA Framework offering a relatively gently learning curve for cross-platform development of games for PC, XBox 360 and Windows Phones. It’s not perfect, but they’re doing OK.

Other platforms and manufacturers could follow suit and open up tinkering to a wider audience, but is there even an audience any more?

The vast majority of kids only use computers for games and porn. Then there’s a bunch of boring crap that dad uses like spreadsheets and gay porn. And if there happens to be a copy of Visual Studio on the office computer then it’s so immediately complicated that ten year old Jimmy doesn’t know where to start.

It’s a mess. And it’s, ironically, a mess that has been created by the tinkerers of my generation, who have forgotten why computers excited them in the first place.

What we need is a saviour. No, not a fictional god. We need the one man who’s kept the faith, the one man who never lost his spark. The man who programmed “Elite.”

We need David Braben and his Raspberry Pi.