RD: When you said that I pictured the skies of London being choked with emissions from the production of these computers, but it’s probably less 19th century than that.
PF: No, it’s like an old Sony factory where they used to make, you know, whatever. Trinitrons. It was supposed to be for educational purposes. I’m writing about this. The British have this very different culture of computing. It doesn’t seem like their nerds get beat up as much, or have to hide in shame.
RD: They’re all war heroes.
PF: Yeah. So it’s this one guy, and I can’t remember his name, sadly, but he just was like, “We can have a system on a chip, and it can be a little computer, and it could plug into your HDMI, and it could be totally cool.”
So he started to mess with that, and then other people were like, “Yeah, that would be cool. It would be fun to have those.” Then it became this weird thing, where we live in the end times, and everything just gets faster and faster. They came out with the second version of it; same price, but just to nerd out, it’s like quad core plus a gig of memory.
RD: Whoa.
PF: Oh, yeah, it’s ridiculous. I’d give it to a parent who didn’t really like computing. I’d be like, “Here, just here’s a $30 machine. Plug it into the wall, here’s everything you need.”
RD: I remember the computers I had. The first computer I had was just a fraction of that capability, just across the board, and the footprint of it... it was this big beige cinderblock.
PF: With a turbo button.