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

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.

Comments

GPIOs are Wimpy

[BrendaEM]

I like the price-point and the processor speed, but when there's current issues--even driving optocouplers, it takes the fun away from it. Adruinos are hearty. I think that I have only ever blown a single pin, on any of the ones I have, in years of use. I am not so sure why they don't put more RAM on them, either.

Re:GPIOs are Wimpy

[ShanghaiBill]

but when there's current issues--even driving optocouplers, it takes the fun away from it.

That is what a 74LS244 is for. If you want more than just a logical output, use a driver.

Adruinos are hearty.

You are comparing apples and raspberries. Arduinos are dedicated embedded devices. They aren't general purpose computers and don't have HDMI ports, browsers, or Python interpreters. RPs do.

Not much of a homecomputer

[grumbel]

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.

Re:Not much of a homecomputer

[Narcocide]

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.

Re:Not much of a homecomputer

[ediron2]

boot speed has nothing to do with feeling like a home computer. Tell me more about built-in hardware access on apples, commodore, atari, or TRS-anything, because every one of them had various kinds of limitations including fucked up serial/parallel ports, unbuffered I/O, needed software debouncing on switches, lacked sane code elements for I/O, etc.

Python is inches away. Scrounging up keyboards or mice or HDMI screens is trivial. And WTF on 'painfully slow'? Forty years later it's still deep in my skull that Applesoft's for-next gave me about 1000 ops per second. Data rates are astronomically faster on pi, screen res is leaps better, memory limitations are gone.

I did bugbooks, wirewrapped shit, built my own joysticks, struggled my way through UARTS and killing more electronic devices via overvoltage overamperage than any kid should have been allowed. Yes, dropping straight into a single screen running BASIC and fewer things in the system/OS focused attention. But the sheer magnitude of hackability nowadays isn't lesser than the old days, it's awesome as hell. And the price?.... pshaw, a week of lunch money vs. years of paperboy pay.

Re:Not much of a homecomputer

[sad_]

"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.

IMO It's all about the price point

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: IMO It's all about the price point

[Shikaku]

It's really simple actually: do experimental stuff with the device however you want, because $30 isn't a large amount of money wasted if you destroy it by accident especially versus $200, $1200 or even $3000.

The best alternative to Intel machines

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the nice things about the Raspberry Pi is that it's immune to the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities because it uses the ARM Cortex-A53 processor.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/why-raspberry-pi-isnt-vulnerable-to-spectre-or-meltdown/

Of course, it's not the only company producing computers based on the ARM Cortex-A53. Pine64 is another example. But these sorts of computers seem to be the best option for secure computing that's current available.

Geek plaything

[redback]

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.

Re:Geek plaything

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Geek plaything

[hankwang]

But $35 vs. $100 is not a meaningful comparison; a minimal RPi kit costs about $70 (with enclosure, power supply, and an sd card that can handle lots of small files), and that's still without keyboard, mouse, and hdmi cable.

How much would one of those $100 SBCs cost including periphrals?

It's a product of its time

[drewsup]

Back at the turn of the century ( man that still sounds weird) we had mini ITX , ya they were small, but not as small as a pi, and required a small pc power supply, now we have something smaller, faster, powered by a wallwart that does what most tinkerers want do, for 10 quid ! (/for a zero) fuck me they were packaging the zero in magazines!! And some people still find a way to bitch about them :(

The Visible Computer: 6502

[swell]

Here's some info from the manual:

"The Visible Computer: 6502 Machine Language Teaching System combines
this manual with a 6502 simulator program to provide a systematic way
to learn machine language programming on Apple II computers.

The Visible Computer is a program that teaches programming. The title
is a takeoff on those transparent plastic models of men that once (and
maybe still do) populated sixth grade classrooms. Like The Visible
Man, The Visible Computer lets you see into a place not normally
accessible to the eye. Places like chest cavities and accumulators,
address latches and pancrei. Unlike The Visible Man, TVC requires no
assembly, no careful painting, and no smelly airplane glue."

TVC was a powerful combination of text, graphics and a kind of animation that showed things like registers changing as a program was executed. You could slow or even step thru a program and watch all elements moving around. At its fastest, the emulated program was still very slow in the early Apple computer, but the important thing was seeing it in action and really understanding what's under the hood. Simple to look at, elegant in execution. A version was available for Commodore 64, both by Charles Anderson.

This concept could be done today for modern computers if someone cared enough about coding education. You can see the 1982 manual here: https://archive.org/details/Th...

Minimal cost

[DrYak]

But $35 vs. $100 is not a meaningful comparison; a minimal RPi kit costs about $70

Not necessarily. This device is specially intended for geeks, and wanna be geeks.
(i.e.: for /.ers and their kids)

People with usually lots of junk laying around.

(with enclosure,

Cool to have one, but not necessary. If you're careful enough (try to avoid shorting pins or whatever) you could begin using your Pi without one.
And then any non conductive box (including random cardboad and plastic box) could serve as a good enough make-shift case in most situations.

(Been there, done that with my first Pi)

power supply,

The most common power supply that you are (or at least: "...were...", back when the Pi launched) going to have laying around at home is a micro-USB charger. Virtually anything uses them (smartphone, rechargeable gadgets, powerbanks, etc.)

So that's why the RPi went for a micro-USB connector instead of a barrel like some are complaining :
because in a pinch you can grab whatever you have around and plug the Pi and at least boot it
(even though you might not provide enough watts for the full 1-point-something GHz speeds of modern RPi 2 and 3 to be available, and might end up throttling down to base 600Mhz with "Undervolt" warnings. But you can still get some (albeit slow) work out of it)

Now with the industry shift from micro USB to USB-C, raspberry pi are probably going to shift to USB-C at some point in the future (Pi 4 ?) because now that's the one you'll end up having around.

and an sd card that can handle lots of small files),

everybody has tons of SD cards laying around given that's the format used by pretty much everything (smartphone, photo camera, portable gaming console, etc.)
again you could grab one laying around.
Whether it will handle the abuses of running an OS is a different matter (that's probably what you meant with 'that can handle...') or if it will die soon is a different matter.
But that won't stop you from experimenting

and that's still without keyboard, mouse, and hdmi cable.

which are exactly of the type (USB HID devices) that you'll have around.

TL;DR: the type of people who are likely interested to experiment with a Pi have a high change of having hte (extremely standard) accessories laying around, and can progressively buy more adapted (e.g.: 3A power supply, SD card with ECC, etc.) at a later point in time.

RPi

[Tarlus]

Certainly not the first nor the most powerful of its kind, but among the most popular. I didn't think much about this until I saw Raspberry Pi 3's sitting on the shelf at Target a few weeks ago.

I still have my first gen that I used for many years as an SSH tunnel, Mumble server and LAMP development server. I could just leave it running 24/7 at home and it barely sips any power.

Nowadays I have it mounted to a clipboard with a breakout and some breadboards to try to encourage interest in programming and electronics for my children... back to the roots of what these things were originally conceived to be.