of design by committee I’ve seen, and to be honest, I hated it at first. (I have since come to love the name, because it works really well—but it took a
bit of getting used to since I’d been calling the project the “ABC Micro” in my head for years.) It’s “Raspberry” because there’s a long tradition of
fruit names in computer companies (besides the obvious, there are the old Tangerine and Apricot computers—and we like to think of the Acorn as a
fruit as well). “Pi” is a mangling of “Python”, which we thought early on in development would be the only programming language available on a
much less powerful platform than the Raspberry Pi we ended up with. As it happens, we still recommend Python as our favourite language for
learning and development, but there is a world of other language options you can explore on the Raspberry Pi too.
In my new role as a chip architect at Broadcom, a big semiconductor company, I had access to inexpensive but high-performing
hardware produced by the company with the intention of being used in very high-end mobile phones—the sort with the HD
video and the 14-megapixel cameras. I was amazed by the difference between the chips you could buy for $10 as a small
developer, and what you could buy as a cell-phone manufacturer for roughly the same amount of money: general purpose
processing, 3D graphics, video and memory bundled into a single BGA package the size of a fingernail. These microchips
consume very little power, and have big capabilities. They are especially good at multimedia, and were already being used by
set-top box companies to play high-definition video. A chip like this seemed the obvious next step for the shape the Raspberry Pi
was taking, so I worked on taping out a low-cost variant that had an ARM microprocessor on board and could handle the
processing grunt we needed.
We felt it was important to have a way to get kids enthusiastic about using a Raspberry Pi even if they didn’t feel very
enthusiastic about programming. In the 1980s, if you wanted to play a computer game, you had to boot up a box that went
“bing” and fed you a command prompt. It required typing a little bit of code just to get started, and most users didn’t ever go
beyond that—but some did, and got beguiled into learning how to program by that little bit of interaction. We realised that the
Raspberry Pi could work as a very capable, very tiny, very cheap modern media centre, so we emphasised that capability to
suck in the unwary—with the hope that they’d pick up some programming while they’re at it.
After about five years’ hard grind, we had created a very cute prototype board, about the size of a thumb drive. We included a
permanent camera module on top of the board to demonstrate the sort of peripherals that can easily be added, and brought it
along to a number of meetings with the BBC’s R&D department. Those of us who grew up in the UK in the 1980s had learned a
lot about 8-bit computing from the BBC Microcomputer and the ecosystem that had grown up around it—with BBC-produced
books, magazines and TV programmes—so I’d hoped that they might be interested in developing the Raspberry Pi further. But
as it turned out, something has changed since we were kids: various competition laws in the UK and the EU meant that “the
Beeb” couldn’t become involved in the way we’d hoped. In a last-ditch attempt to get something organised with them, we
ditched the R&D department idea and David (he of the giant address book) organised a meeting with Rory Cellan-Jones, a
senior tech journalist, in May 2011. Rory didn’t hold out much hope for partnership with the BBC, but he did ask if he could
take a video of the little prototype board with his phone, to put on his blog.
The next morning, Rory’s video had gone viral, and I realised that we had accidentally promised the world that we’d make
everybody a $25 computer.
While Rory went off to write another blog post on exactly what it is that makes a video go viral, we went off to put our thinking
caps on. That original, thumb-drive-sized prototype didn’t fit the bill: with the camera included as standard, it was way too
expensive to meet the cost model we’d suggested (the $25 figure came from my statement to the BBC that the Raspberry Pi
should cost around the same as a text book, and is a splendid demonstration of the fact that I had no idea how much text books
cost these days), and the tiny prototype model didn’t have enough room around its periphery for all the ports we needed to
make it as useable as we wanted it to be. So we spent a year working on engineering the board to lower cost as much as
possible while retaining all the features we wanted (engineering cost down is a harder job than you might think), and to get the
Raspberry Pi as useable as possible for people who might not be able to afford much in the way of peripherals.
We knew we wanted the Raspberry Pi to be used with TVs at home, just like the ZX Spectrum in the 1980s, saving the user the
cost of a monitor. But not everybody has access to an HDMI television, so we added a composite port to make the Raspberry
Pi work with an old cathode-ray television instead since SD cards are cheap and easy to find. We decided against microSD as
the storage medium, because the little fingernail-sized cards are so flimsy in the hands of children and so easy to lose. And we
went through several iterations of power supply, ending up with a micro USB cable. Recently, micro USB became the standard
charger cable for mobile telephones across the EU (and it’s becoming the standard everywhere), which means the cables are
becoming more and more ubiquitous, and in many cases, people already have them at home.
By the end of 2011, with a projected February release date, it was becoming obvious to us that things were moving faster, and
demand was higher, than we were ever going to be able to cope with. The initial launch was always aimed at developers, with
the educational launch planned for later in 2012. We have a small number of very dedicated volunteers, but we need the wider
Linux community to help us prepare a software stack and iron out any early-life niggles with the board before releasing into the
educational market. We had enough capital in the Foundation to buy the parts for and build 10,000 Raspberry Pis over a period
of a month or so, and we thought that the people in the community who would be interested in an early board would come to
around that number. Fortunately and unfortunately, we’d been really successful in building a big online community around the
device, and interest wasn’t limited to the UK, or to the educational market. Ten thousand was looking less and less realistic.
