"How long does it take you to look up a file from your archives?" I asked, impudently.

"Let me show you," said the kindly old proprietor. A wizened man straight out of the pages of a Dickens novel. He pressed a switch on his (landline) phone. "Miss Moneypenny? Could you bring us, let's say, the file from Smith vs Jones in 1997? Thank you. Tea?" The last question was aimed at me. We chatted amiably while the tea was poured and, barely five minutes later, a slightly dusty Miss Moneypenny slid the file onto the desk.

"You see!" The old boy exclaimed, "How could a computer ever be faster than Miss Moneypenny?"

Writing in his book "Platformland", Richard Pope talks about how working with data gives one an appreciation of where it is fast and where it is slow:

It’s hard to appreciate the true nature, risks and opportunities of data, for example, without experiencing the feel of data in a database; the potential for its tables to join together that tugs at the edge of your mind; the intrinsic understanding of what is quick, what is messy and what is risky. If your mental model is a catalogue, or a filing system or a lake, then those things are lost, or at least diluted.

This is also explored in the seminal XKCD 1425.

The lightly fictionalised law firm boss had only dealt with slow computer systems. Grinding hard-disks powered by a 386 running a hookey copy of Windows were already faster than a sprightly secretary scrabbling around in the archives. But his experience of retrieving data, like most people's, was being on interminable hold to call centres, or being told that to expect a written reply in 28 working days, or that the hospital has lost their records. It is no wonder they distrusted digital filing.

As an experiment, download the complete works of Shakespeare in plain text format and then hit ctrl+F (or whatever search you want to use) and try to find the word "invocations". It will be instant. The file isn't a structured database but, in less than a second, you can find every instance of a word. Computers are fast.

And yet, think about every interaction you have with a computer in public? Ticket machines asthmatically wheeze as they slowly trick you into buying the most expensive option. Passing through an airport seems to involve waiting impatiently at a number of desks while arthritic mainframes slowly coalesce your data. Advertising screens stutter and jerk their way through low-framerate videos trying to sell you perfume. Every time you speak to a call centre, I guarantee someone says "sorry, my system's running slow today."

The perception is that most computers are slow.

Would a computerised system have made a difference to that company? Moneypenny would have gotten less dusty, but clients booked their appointments days in advance - so file-retrieval time wasn't critical. Backing up data, insuring its integrity, and keeping it confidential were all important - but digitisation also came with risks. Filing cabinets rarely get hacked and typewritten documents are unlikely to be encrypted by ransomware.

If you pay attention to the news, all you hear about is the times when data goes wrong. You never notice the times when things run smoothly, but you are painfully aware of every time a computer screws up.

It is no wonder that even the most basic efforts of digitisation are heavily resisted by those without empathy for what computers can do - and how fast they can work - when set up properly,

Most programming languages have the concept of relational operators. How does variable X compare to variable Y?

If we want to ask if X is less than or equal to Y, we write X <= Y. Which is a bit weird, because Unicode has a "less-than-or-equal-to" character: ≤. But because there's no button for that on a standard keyboard, we use a hacky solution of jamming two characters together.

In the R language, the assignment operator is <- this is because programming keyboards used to have a ← button on them. That button has gone from modern machines, so we make do and mend.

There are some programming fonts which contain ligatures to automatically convert these characters (although this makes some people very grumpy).

Unicode includes ⩶ (U+2A76) and ⩵ (U+2A75) as distinct glyphs. So why are we still hitting the = key multiple times like savages?

This leads to the deeply weird situation where "⩵" ≠ "==" and absolutely no programming language that I know of will let you use the correct Unicode characters!

(Except, of course, Raku - which made this change based on my suggestion.)

Ideally, we need programming languages which support Unicode symbols as first class characters, and keyboards with a hundred more buttons.

Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech synthesis.

Recently, people have worked out a way to perform ray-tracing on it!

@bbcmicrobot@mastodon.me.uk

@bbcmicrobot
Automated

FEATURE ANNOUNCEMENT! @bbcmicrobot is at warp speed thanks to beebjit from @scarybeasts !

Include a 🚀 in your tweet run for 3 HOURS emulation time - 21 billion emulated 6502 cycles - and you'll get a screenshot reply in around a minute.

NB GXR ROM is disabled in this mode pic.x.com/XZut4o2RpO

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The next computer our house got was the Sega Megadrive. The first game that console saw was, I think, Alex Kidd. A basic 2D platformer.

Sure, it was streets ahead of the Beeb, but the graphics weren't amazing.

But, over the years, they got better. By the time the MegaDrive stopped getting new games in 1997, the graphics and audio available were utterly transformed. In eight years, we'd gone from a limited pallet 2D screen to this:

Stunning music, and liquid smooth 2D graphics with parallax and complex transformations.

3D! Three-friken-Dee!

Some enterprising hackers managed to get Wolfenstein 3D running on hardware which was originally intended for cheap side-scrollers.

And nothing about the console had changed. The tools used to create games had improved. The maths and algorithms had leapt ahead. And the ingenuity of the designers had increased. But the physical hardware was identical.

Once you understand a system - deeply understand - it can do things that its designers never thought possible. You can push hardware beyond its apparent limits.

We're so spoiled today. Every week a newer, faster processor is released. Hardware gets cheaper and we can just throw more chips at the problem.

What would the world be like if that wasn't the case? What if our progress in computer speed suddenly came to a stop? I think history shows us that we would be able to work around the restrictions to do things which seem impossible.

Even when machines break down, they can still be made to perform unexpected miracles. A billion-and-a-half kilometres away, the Voyager 2 probe broke down. Software instructions were sent which told the craft to do something it wasn't intended to do. The craft was instructed to cycle its heating system in order to correct the flow of lubrication. All of a sudden its capabilities were upgraded and it was able to continue its mission for another half-century.

Mars is the only planet in the solar system which is entirely populated by robots from Planet Earth. Those robots aren't receiving any hardware upgrades any time soon. But their software gets upgraded to allow their hardware to perform new tasks.

We don't necessarily need faster, better hardware. We need more thoughtful, and more creative humans.

It is miniscule - almost dominated by the Ethernet port. And the specifications are ridiculously good - considering this thing costs US$10 + postage.

• 256MB RAM
• USB-C power
• Ethernet
• 26 GPIO pins
• Another 26 pins for voice/audio (I2C, PCM, TDM, PDM, SPDIF, and HDMI ARC)
• And, of course, it runs Ubuntu!

Quickstart

Head over to the download page and grab either Debian or Ubuntu. Follow the guide to burn the OS to a micro SD card.

Shove the card in the Pi, and attach the board to your computer using a USB-C cable. Here comes the clever bit!

The OS responds to adb (Android Debug Bridge) commands.

adb shell connects to the Rock Pi.

/bin/bash starts the regular shell.

By default, a "heartbeat" LED blinks.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

And, for those who like well-lit close-ups of circuits…

Did I mention that the board only costs $10? pic.x.com/WhEJ5RcBLS

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Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

BLINKENLIGHTS! pic.x.com/RXfomlCTt6

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Disable it with the following command:

echo none > /sys/class/leds/rockpis\:blue\:user/trigger

OK. Now what?

Connect to the Internet

The higher spec versions have WiFi and Bluetooth. If you want them on this version, you'll need to plug them in to the USB port. Or, shove an ethernet cable in it. Once connected, the date automagically updates and you can upgrade the OS with

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

SSH is enabled on the device, if you don't want to use ADB. The default username / password is rock.

Music

The board is pretty well optimised for audio work.

As a test, I ran an example .wav through the Opus encoder, on a ridiculous quality setting.

Encoding using libopus 1.1.2 (audio)
-----------------------------------------------------
   Input: 48kHz 2 channels
  Output: 2 channels (2 coupled)
          20ms packets, 512kbit/sec VBR
 Preskip: 312

Encoding complete                                
-----------------------------------------------------
       Encoded: 1 minute and 30.82 seconds
       Runtime: 13 seconds
                (6.986x realtime)
         Wrote: 5647048 bytes, 4541 packets, 100 pages
       Bitrate: 494.968kbit/s (without overhead)
 Instant rates: 121.6kbit/s to 510.4kbit/s
                (304 to 1276 bytes per packet)
      Overhead: 0.494% (container+metadata)

Good enough! Decoding back to .wav from .opus took 6 seconds.

The arm64 version of ffmpeg is also available. It was similarly quick at decoding AC3 and DTS audio.

Conclusion

Obviously, everyone wants to know how this compares to the Raspberry Pi.

Pros

Cheap! Tiny! And USB-C. Everything I love in a device.

The audio support is magnificent.

Cons

Lack of community. There's excellent documentation, but the forum is sparsely populated. There are lots of enthusiasts, but I worry that's not enough to sustain interest.

It is audio only - no HDMI for video output.

Like many Brits, I learned about the Second World War at school. I devoured books - fiction and non - about the war. What interested me wasn't the tales of derring-do, of men fighting for their lives, bombs, guns, bullets and knives. No, what interested me was the idea about intelligence. The concept that by learning about your enemy you could understand and counteract their efforts.

I don't remember where I first heard about Bletchley Park and the Enigma Machine. I certainly remember it from Simon Singh's The Code Book and Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. What I do remember is being astounded by the mathematical brilliance of the people involved in designing the first computers. That a bunch of mathematicians and - as we'd call them today - computer programers could shorten the war by an estimated 18 months. They never fired a single shot. They never dropped a bomb. They never designed a killing machine. They sat and thought. Then built. Then thought some more. Then they defeated their enemy. And they did it all an hour away from London. How could I resist the urge to go?

The event was unOrganised by Big Geek Day Out.

Big Geek Days Out are "unEvents" - one person organises a time and place for people to meet and that's it. Everything else is done by the people coming to the event.

An annual ticket to Bletchley Park is a mere £8.50. An utter bargain.

The tragedy of Bletchley is three-fold. The work it did was kept secret for so long that many of those involved died before they could receive proper recognition. The secrecy robbed Britain of a competitive advantage in designing the next generation of computers. Finally, the park has been ignored by the Government and been allowed to decay.

This is perhaps the only second world war battleground that exists on British soil. This museum is a national treasure and should be treated as such.

Here are some images and video from the day. You can also view the entire set on Flickr.

Alan Turing

It's no exaggeration to say that Turing is the father of the computer. It's also no exaggeration to say that he was betrayed by his government.

An Original Enigma Machine

Bletchley holds an original Enigma Machine. I was lucky enough to help one of the guides demonstrate its formidable encryption and decryption capabilities. Had the Wehrmacht better understood cryptography and its limitations, the Enigma could have been their deadliest weapon. As it was, the weaknesses were discovered and exploited by a remarkable team of people.

Russian Fialka M125 Cypher Machine

They also have an amazing array of historical encryption devices, including this Russian example.

Finally, the tour guides at Bletchley are quite magnificent. Here's our guide talking about Colossus.

If you have even the slightest interest in the history of computing, you owe it to yourself to visit Bletchley Park.