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Eben Upton Remembers The Years Before the First Raspberry Pi (techrepublic.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the creating-not-consuming dept.

Tech Republic re-visits the story of the earliest attempts to build the Raspberry Pi, and the dramatic launch of a quest "to rekindle the curiosity about computing in a generation immersed in technology but indifferent to how it worked." [T]he dominant computers -- games consoles and later tablets and smartphones -- no longer offered an invitation to create, but rather to consume. Eben Upton recalls a bonfire party in 2007 where an 11-year-old boy told him he wanted to be an electrical engineer, and his disappointment at realizing the boy didn't have access to a computer he could program on. "I said, 'Oh, what computer have you got?'. He said, 'I've got a Nintendo Wii'. And there was just that awful feeling about there being a kid who was excited, a kid who was showing concrete interest in our profession, and who didn't have access to a programmable computer, a computer of any sort. He just had a games console."

At this time Upton was working as a system-on-a-chip architect at chip designer Broadcom, and realized he had the skills to try to halt this drift away from computers that encouraged users to code.
Upton describes the Raspberry Pi as "a very conscious attempt" to bring back the easily programmable home computers that he remembered as a child in the 1980s -- and he was gratified at its success. "Even early on you started to see those pictures of kids lying on the living room floor, looking up at the TV with Raspberry Pi plugged into it, the same way we used to."

It was named "Pi" because it booted into a version of Python, and Raspberry because "There's a lot of fruit-named computer companies, and the 'blowing a raspberry' thing was also deliberate."

It's gone on to become the world's third best-selling general-purpose computer.

6 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Not much of a homecomputer by grumbel · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Calling it a "home computer" always bothered me a little, as while the Raspberry Pi has it's uses, it really doesn't look or feel anything like the home computer of yesterday. You don't really have much low level hardware access on the thing outside of the GPIOs (which were not even a goal of the initial design), it doesn't instantly boot, it doesn't give you an instant programming environment like BASIC did and it runs painfully slow compared to a regular old PC. So it's really just a regular old Linux running on slow hardware and not a very stable one at that (e.g. hot plugging USB devices crashes the device).

    For learning hardware I find Arduino's far more useful and for learning software I much rather have a real PC than using a slow and bugged RaspberryPi. Of course when you already know hardware and software well, you can take a RaspberryPi and build a TV box or a emulator out of it, but as a learning device the RaspberryPi always felt very ill suited to me.

    1. Re:Not much of a homecomputer by Narcocide · · Score: 3, Interesting

      There are better choices on the market now though, that didn't exist before the Raspberry Pi or the Arduino. Many of which in fact only exist now because competition validated the demand for such devices.

      Mind you, most of them still aren't as moddable as an early Commodore but some of them are actually decent from a performance standpoint now days.

    2. Re:Not much of a homecomputer by sad_ · · Score: 3, Interesting

      "it doesn't instantly boot, it doesn't give you an instant programming environment like BASIC did"

      it just runs a regular linux, you can hack it so that it boots up an c64 emulator that will throw you into basic, boots in 2 seconds.
      if you don't want to hack something quick together, there are specific raspi distro's available that turn it into some kind of retro computer, the most known is probably amibian, which transforms it into an Amiga.

      --
      On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
  2. IMO It's all about the price point by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And it always has been.

    As teenagers in the 70s my brother and I drooled over the S100 Z-80-based computers but couldn't come up with the minimum $2000 or so to play

    The early Apple ][s in 1977 at around $1200 or so started to be affordable, and were built to tinker with.

    The Commodore C64 in the 1980s at under $200 was a huge deal.

    Nobody was going to risk blowing up a $3000 Mac tinkering with it

    At $30, the rPi takes us back to Commodore C64 times. If you brick it, no big deal. I'm not at all surprised it's as popular as it is.

  3. Geek plaything by redback · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I think the secret to the success of the Pi has been the fact that its an appealing platform for messing around with all kinds of things.

    I don't think it would have taken off as well if it had only been useful as a kids toy or educational learning tool.

    But by creating a generally useful cheap linux capable machine, they created a whole market segment with enough demand to drive the product forward. The original goals are almost a side effect at this point.

    1. Re:Geek plaything by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The RaPi really does only one thing well: It's cheap enough to have an extra computer for things to which you wouldn't dedicate a real machine. It has too little RAM to be a desktop, it is to slow to even be a good media player, it uses too much power for most embedded applications and it's very finicky about the power supply, you need a separate controller for GPIO if the timing is critical, analog sound output is atrocious, networking and storage are limited by the USB speed, It is a shame that the community support is wasted on a machine which is so full of compromises that it doesn't do anything right, except that it's cheap.