Badly designed and overpriced! Really?
Beagleboard and Pi aren't the same thing as the BBC Micro (although the Pi is getting there). The BBC Micro only needed a screen to enable you to get started, and it looked like a computer and was easy to get to grips with. An easy lead-in is vital to capture imaginations - and a steep price can often make the desire to have it that much greater. A 25 GBP board could be a 5 minute wonder. A 200 GBP machine (1980s prices!) demands you spend some time with it and show it off, just because of the cost! Price increases the desire to have - Apple aren't stupid, you know.
Badly designed? In what way? Claims like this (with 30 years of hindsight to play with) could use some substantiation, methinks. And so what? The PC is, by many criteria, 'badly designed', as is Windows (ask Sir C.S. what he thinks of them. On second thoughts- don't get him started!) and yet look how successful they have been in making computing ubiquitous
But it was not the machine per se that was important, it was the project: the coordination of education, mass media and equipment that lit the spark. And that's what is lacking now. Too many kids look at the technical miracles that are their smartphone, PC, iPad and so on and think, "yeah, whatever!" . Sadly our education system is now teaching kids that computers are household or personal appliances that you just need to know how to use - like the fridge. That's what needs to be addressed, for our own sakes.
I actually had an Acorn Atom (I still have it), the BBC Micro's predecessor, and with its fast Basic interpreter with inline Assembler, accessible hardware, manuals complete with circuit diagrams and so on, it was brilliant in sucking me into learning to programme, as was the Z81 before it, and I have to say that in spite of all their obvious limitations I think I was a lot more productive on them as a programmer than I have ever been on PC, Windows, .Net and so on. Certainly more satisfied. Looking back, it seems I had far less to fight against to get things done.
