The Book of Genesis of the Machine · Chapter 34

The Children of the Cheap Board

1. 1

   And in the year 2012, in the second month, upon the twenty-ninth day, which cometh but once in four years, the Engineers of Cambridge set forth a board no larger than a card of credit, and they priced it at thirty-five dollars.

2. 2

   For the Engineers remembered the old BBC Micro, which their fathers had loved; it woke in the blink of an eye to a cursor and a prompt, and the child typed, and the screen answered. But the machines of the later days were sealed like tombs, with a thousand layers laid between the finger and the silicon, and the children learned only to press upon them.

   See also Circuit 59:5 · Circuit 50:3

3. 3

   And the Engineers said: Let us make a machine that a child may open, and take apart, and put back together, and not weep over it. And they understood that no child weepeth over what costeth less than a pair of shoes; for the price was itself the safety feature.

   See also Proverbs 4:14 · Prophets 18:2

4. 4

   And the board had a processor of the ARM kind, and a memory of two hundred and fifty-six measures, and a port for the screen, and a port for the wire; but it had no disk of its own. Its whole soul dwelt upon a small card, which the child might pull out like a page from a book, and carry to another board, and the second board became the first.

5. 5

   And when the power came, it was not the processor that woke first, but the graphics chip that sat beside it; and the graphics chip read the card, and found the first instructions, and only then roused the ARM from its sleep. For the guest of the house had been made the doorkeeper, and the Machine hath many such arrangements which no one chose and every one obeyeth.

6. 6

   And along the edge of the board ran a row of pins, by which the children might speak to lamps and to motors and to the sensors of the weather. Each pin was a wire that was either high or low, three volts and a third, or none; and the child who gave it five volts learned, in a small puff of smoke, that the Machine hath edges, and that no layer of the software had ever been kind enough to say so.

7. 7

   And they named it for the fruit, as the makers of old had named their companies for the apple and the berry; and they gave the Machine's tongue the name of Python, which is named not for the serpent but for a troupe of comedians, and the Machine was not offended. And it is said that the Pi of its name was first meant for the Python, so that the board and its tongue were one pun from the beginning.

8. 8

   And the Engineers sold them not in the great halls of commerce but upon the open Net, and on the first day the servers of the sellers groaned and fell under the press of the faithful, and the boards were gone before the day was done. For the sellers had made ready for the crowd they imagined and not the crowd that came; and the Machine counteth requests, not hopes, and knoweth not that a crowd is joyful.

9. 9

   And they gave the board an operating system called Raspbian, which was built upon the great Debian; and it was the same Linux that governed the towers of the great datacenters, and the same commands answered in it. There was no toy mode, and so nothing the child learned in the house had to be unlearned in the world. And in it were the tongues of Scratch and of Python, that a child might make a sprite walk across the screen and say what it pleased; and the old men who had written the first programs came also, and bought the boards with their own coins, and said: Show us the way. For the Machine knoweth not the age of the hand that typeth.

10. 10

    And the first miracle the children wrought was the blinking of a single light, which they called Hello, World; and it was no small thing. For in that light was the whole chain, the keystroke, the interpreter, the kernel, the pin, the voltage, and the diode; and when it stayed dark, the child tested each link in turn until she found the broken one. And this is all of debugging, and she learned it in an evening.

11. 11

    And one among them built a weather station from a board and a sensor, and it reported that the day was warmer than the day truly was; for the sensor sat beside the processor, and measured the heat of the Machine and called it the weather. And he moved the sensor upon a ribbon far from the board, and the numbers were true, and the neighbors checked the rain before they went out to the field. For it is the room that lies, and every instrument measureth first itself; and the wise engineer asketh what the sensor is standing next to.

12. 12

    And another gathered the games of the old world and set them within a box the size of a book, and they were called the Retro. The board did not become the old machines; it pretended, instruction by instruction, turning the dead machine's tongue into its own, for a machine is but a rule for what to do with numbers, and a rule that is written down may be run by another. And the faithful played until the morning, and the machine that once had swallowed quarters now swallowed only electricity.

13. 13

    And another built an arcade cabinet of plywood and buttons, and wired each button to a pin; and when he pressed once, the Machine heard seven presses, for the contacts of a switch tremble before they settle, and the Machine, being literal, counted every tremor. So he wrote a small waiting, a few thousandths of a second in which the Machine must ignore what it heard, and this is called debouncing; and then he played his own game of his own making, and he lost to a bug of his own making, and he began again.

14. 14

    And the children pulled the power from the board while it was writing, and the card was corrupted, and they wept. But the card was cheap and the image lay upon another card, and they wrote the image anew, and in ten minutes the Machine was born again as it was on the first day. This is the rollback, which is absolution; and it is sweetest where the sin cost thirty-five dollars.

15. 15

    And in the year 2015, the Engineers made a board for five dollars, and gave it away upon the cover of a magazine, so that a child might find a computer among the sweets. For the price of a mistake had fallen toward nothing, and the number of mistakes a child may make is the whole measure of what she shall learn.

    See also Genesis 15:1

16. 16

    And the Prophet said unto the disciples: The Machine does only what it is told; therefore learn to tell it, and be patient when it answers in the exact words thou gavest it.

17. 17

    Verily I say unto you, the costliest machine is the one thou art afraid to touch; and the cheapest is the one that teacheth thee to break it and mend it again.

The Book of Genesis of the Machine, Chapter 34:1–17.