Paul McLellan

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Raspberry Pi Is Ten Years Old

• 5 minute read

breakfast bytes logo I'm sure you know what Raspberry Pi is. It was actually launched on February 29, 2012. Well, 2022 is not a leap year so we don't have a February 29 this year, so March 1 will have to do. The whole story of Raspberry Pi is pretty interesting. I wrote recently about the BBC Micro on its own 40th anniversary. (See my post Today Is the 40th Anniversary of the BBC Micro...and the Ancestry of Arm.) The BBC Micro turned out to be very successful, not just in terms of the number of machines sold, but the way that it encouraged interest in computer science and also meant that most people who showed up at university to study computer science already had some experience of programming and so could hit the ground running.

Eben Upton was a director of studies at St Johns College, one of the thirty-ish colleges that make up Cambridge University. He is also a computer scientist by background. He started to see what he considered a worrying trend. When Eben himself had gone to study computer science at Cambridge back in 1996, they had a typical over-subscription ratio of 6:1. That is, six times as many people wanted to study computer science as there were places available. By the time Eben finished his PhD and became a director of studies, the oversubscription ratio had dropped. A lot. Instead of having 500 applicants for 80 spaces, it was more like 200, and still dropping. Worse, with nothing equivalent to the BBC Micro to follow it up, the Computer Science Department had to spend the first part of the 60 weeks of computer science program building up skills (programming mostly) that they used to be able to take for granted.

If anything, the equivalent of the BBC Micro were gaming consoles like Xbox or Playstation. But they were not programmable and so users didn't develop any computer science skills, just skills at playing the actual games. Eben wondered if there was something that they could do about this. As I said in my post The Amazing Raspberry Pi Story, he and his colleagues felt that there was a niche for a computer to go in kid's bedrooms. His criteria were:

  1. Programmable, obviously
  2. Had to be interesting, able to do other things than just programming (that meant games, graphics, video)
  3. Robust (capable of being thrown in a schoolbag day after day)
  4. Cheap (benchmark was a school textbook, so picked $25…which shows how little they knew about how much textbooks cost)

Around then, Eben left the St Johns and went to work at Broadcom. As it happened, Broadcom coincidentally produced the perfect chip for a little single-board computer with an Arm 11 inside. They kept trying to persuade the BBC (of BBC Micro fame) to take it on and make it the new BBC Micro (they even had a name, the BBC Nano). But for various reasons that never happened.

It turned out that, despite the BBC's reluctance, it turned out that there was a huge latent demand for something like this. Another quote from my earlier post:

Their last attempt was in May 2011, when they went to see Rory Cellan-Jones, the senior technology correspondent for the BBC. They said “can we put a BBC logo on it?” and he said “no.” But “I think it's a great idea,” he said. “Can I take a video of one of you holding up the prototype and talking about it?” So they made a two-minute video of one of the foundation holding up something—that looks nothing like the eventual Raspberry Pi—and talking about the project. 

That video got 600,000 YouTube views in two days.

For a couple of days, Eben was on cloud nine and then it hit him. “We’d promised 600,000 people we’d build them a $25 computer, and we had no idea how to do it.”

As it happened, a UK subsidiary of Avnet and RS Components agreed not just to distribute the boards but to manufacture them. So the Raspberry Pi foundation went from being a planned manufacturer of computers, as Acorn had been for the BBC Micro, to an IP licensing organization.

As I said above, the product launched on February 29, 2012 and they sold 100,000 units on the first day. They would probably have sold more if their website had stayed up reliably.

Since then, they have sold over 40 million units and created a market worth over $1B. That doesn't even include the peripherals, such as the camera. It has spread much more widely than its original mission of computer science education and is used in all sorts of commercial applications, too.

But did it succeed in its original mission? To increase the number of applicants to study computer science at Cambridge University? Here's a quote from an article on the Cambridge University website, The life of Pi: Ten years of Raspberry Pi:

From the time that Upton and the team started working on the Raspberry Pi to the tenth anniversary of its launch, the number of undergraduate students applying to Cambridge’s undergraduate computer science course has increased eight-fold, from a low point of around 200 applicants in 2007 to more than 1,600 in 2021.

In every dimension, Raspberry Pi has been a resounding success, the most successful computer ever to come out of the UK. And it was originally launched ten years ago today.

Cadence and Raspberry Pi

As it happens, the boards for the Raspberry Pi devices were designed with Cadence's PCB tools. For details, see my posts:

Learn More

Well, you have to be in the UK to take advantage of this one, but the Raspberry Pi Foundation has partnered with the National Museum of Computing (which is in Bletchley Park, home of the code-breakers in WWII) to create a new temporary exhibit dedicated to telling the story of the Raspberry Pi computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and the global community of innovators, learners, and educators it is a part of. The grand opening of the exhibit will be live-streamed at 11:15am next Saturday (March 5).

For more about the museum and about Bletchley Park, see my posts:

 

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