[Oberon] oberonstation vs. a $9 computer

[Lars]

On Mon, February 8, 2016 11:12 am, skulski at pas.rochester.edu wrote:
> Lars:
>
>
> It is sort of funny that one can use the low price as an argument. How
> much do you value your time? Let's say it is $5 per hour, way below minimum
> wage. How much time will you spend on getting anything done with any piece
> of hardware, be it Arduino, RPi, Beagle Bone, or Oberon Station? Are you
> going to achieve anything meaningful in less than 10 hours? If so then I
> will consider hiring you for $50 per hour.
>

Ever consider a product, that builds on raspberry pi, or Orange pi, like
an MP3 player that is hackable. Most MP3 players are soldered/melted
together so you cannot modify them, and cost about $15, or if you want to
get ripped off go to Apple and buy one for $200 or whatever the latest
iPod costs. Now consider an orange pi or raspberry pi that is literally an
MP3 player you can modify and customize to do anything you want. No one is
ever going to buy a $150 oberon mp3 player when you can buy an orange pi
based on for $50 or less that does way more, and even has USB.

OberonStation is simply an academic learning experience like STANDARD
pascal and will fade away into obscurity. I am a prophet of sorts, and
have predicted such demise before.

> The low price does indeed matter if you will use the hardware in a
> finished product. They are talking of a disposable computer. If you are
> going to basically throw it away after a single use (provided that you
> environmental soul lets you do it), then indeed $9 matters.

But the oberonstation is also disposable. You can simply download an
oberonstation Emulator and play with it, and forget about buying it
altogether... define "disposable".  Last I heard, raspberry pis are not in
fact disposable at all, considering people still own them from many years
ago and still use them, and even resell them on ebay. A truly disposable
product is one that has no market value on ebay: search ebay for
OberonStation and you get zero results. I.e. a product that has no value:
disposable.

Tell me what you can actually do with oberonstation that's worth $100
bucks or even $70 bucks, that you can't do with Rasp Pi or Orange pi. An
orange pi costs around $15. Why couldn't you simply buy an orange pi, and
run an oberon emulator on it, and save $100 or more. Or port oberon over
to Orange Pi, not as an educational minimalist project since USB is not
something that is as simple as PS/2. But there is something out there
called the real world. Rasp. Pi and Orange pi sell millions, while oberon
station has zero followers (virtually).

A school is not going to spend $100 on a device that has almost zero
features, when an Orange Pi costs $15 and cuts the schools' cost down
almost tenfold.  Oberon is intended for teaching, and even that it has
failed at, because the Rasp Pi is more affordable for schools.  I supposed
a subsidized socialist tax based system could afford to buy 10,000 Oberon
Station's if the country had some oil royalties (Norway) to pay the bill.
Welcome to the real world where Orange Pi, BeagleBone, and Rasp Pi will
literally kill OberonStation in sales and popularity. Not that popularity
is the only measure of success, as we all know that C++ and PHP are
examples of popular failures.