Raspberry Pi A User Manual page 20

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in their spare time. So the initial idea behind the Raspberry Pi was a very parochial one with
a very tight (and pretty unambitious) focus: I wanted to make a tool to get the small number
of applicants to this small university course a kick start. My colleagues and I imagined we'd
hand out these devices to schoolkids at open days, and if they came to Cambridge for an
interview a few months later, we'd ask what they'd done with the free computer we'd given
them. Those who had done something interesting would be the ones that we'd be interested
in having in the program. We thought maybe we'd make a few hundred of these devices, or
best case, a lifetime production run of a few thousand.
Of course, once work was seriously underway on the project, it became obvious that there was
a lot more we could address with a cheap little computer like this. What we started with is a
long way indeed from the Raspberry Pi you see today. I began by soldering up the longest piece
of breadboard you can buy at Maplin with an Atmel chip at our kitchen table, and the first
crude prototypes used cheap microcontroller chips to drive a standard-definition TV set
directly. With only 512 K of RAM, and a few MIPS of processing power, these prototypes were
very similar in performance to the original 8-bit microcomputers. It was hard to imagine these
machines capturing the imaginations of kids used to modern games consoles and iPads.
There had been discussions at the University Computer Lab about the general state of com-
puter education, and when I left the Lab for a non-academic job in the industry, I noticed
that I was seeing the same issues in young job applicants as I'd been seeing at the University.
So I got together with my colleagues Dr Rob Mullins and Professor Alan Mycroft (two col-
leagues from the Computer Lab), Jack Lang (who lectures in entrepreneurship at the
University), Pete Lomas (a hardware guru) and David Braben (a Cambridge games industry
leading light with an invaluable address book), and over beers (and, in Jack's case, cheese and
wine), we set up the Raspberry Pi Foundation—a little charity with big ideas.
Why "Raspberry Pi"?
We get asked a lot where the name "Raspberry Pi" came from. Bits of the name came from
different trustees. It's one of the very few successful bits 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.
R A S P B E R R Y P I U S E R G U I D E , S E C O N D E D I T I O N