The $25 ARM GNU/Linux computer that could change the world

There isn’t much any small group of people can do to address problems like an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But we felt that we could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane that programming experimentation on them had to be forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those old home computers, could boot into a programming environment.

Over the next few years, Eben, having left the university for industry, worked on building prototypes of what has now become the Raspberry Pi in his spare time.

By 2008, processors designed for mobile devices were becoming more affordable, and powerful enough to provide excellent multimedia (a Raspberry Pi can play Blu-Ray-quality video), a feature we felt makes the board desirable to kids who aren’t initially interested in a raw programming device. The project started to look very realisable. Eben came together with a group of friends and old colleagues with a wide-ranging group of skills, some of whom were already wrestling with the problem of what to do about producing new young programmers. These people became the Raspberry Pi board of trustees: David Braben, a star game designer and Cambridgeshire entrepreneur with a book of contacts as long as your arm; Jack Lang, a local academic and business angel who worked on the original BBC Micro project; Pete Lomas, MD of a hardware design and manufacture company where our earliest boards have been designed and built; and Professor Alan Mycroft and Dr Rob Mullins from the Cambridge University Computer Lab, who have provided a lot of the educational direction of the project.

Three years later, we’re nearly at the end of our first run of development – although it’s just the beginning of the Raspberry Pi story. David has been tireless in raising press awareness and finding us sponsorship. Pete has designed and built our first batch of boards for test; Jack runs the business end of things and has a warehouse we’ve filled with hundreds of thousands of pounds-worth of componentry ready to turn into our first boards.

We’ve had enormous interest, support and help from the educational community, and we’ve been delighted and a little humbled by the number of enquiries from agencies and people far away from our original targets for the device. Developing countries are interested in the Raspberry Pi as productivity devices in areas that simply can’t afford the power and hardware needed to run a traditional desktop PC; hospitals and museums have contacted us to find out about using the Raspberry Pi to drive display devices. Parents of severely disabled kids have talked to us about monitoring and accessibility applications; and there seem to be a million and one people out there with hot soldering irons who want to make a robot.

We don’t claim to have all the answers. We don’t think that the Raspberry Pi is a fix to all of the world’s computing issues; we do believe that we can be a catalyst. We want to see cheap, accessible, programmable computers everywhere; we actively encourage other companies to clone what we’re doing. We want to break the paradigm where without spending hundreds of pounds on a PC, families can’t use the internet. We want owning a truly personal computer to be normal for children. We think that 2012 is going to be a very exciting year.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation is a UK registered charity (Registration Number 1129409)

This website is a community website and not part of the official Raspberry Pi Foundation