The History of the Raspberry Pi

The story of the Raspberry Pi starts in 2006 at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory. Eben Upton, Rob Mullins, Jack Lang and Alan Mycroft became concerned at the decline in the volume and skills of students applying to study Computer Science. Typical student applicants did not have a history of hobby programming and tinkering with hardware. Instead they were starting with some web design experience, but little else.

They established that the way that children were interacting with computers had changed. There was more of a focus on working with Word and Excel and building web pages. Games consoles were replacing the traditional hobbyist computer platforms. The era when the Amiga, Apple II, ZX Spectrum and the ‘build your own’ approach was gone. In 2006, Eben and the team began to design and prototype a platform that was cheap, simple and booted into a programming environment. Most of all, the aim was to inspire the next generation of computer enthusiasts to recover the joy of experimenting with computers.

Between 2006 and 2008, they developed prototypes based on the Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller. By 2008, processors designed for mobile devices were becoming affordable and powerful. This allowed the boards to support an graphical environment. They believed this would make the board more attractive for children looking for a programming-oriented device.

Eben, Rob, Jack and Alan, then teamed up with Pete Lomas, and David Braben to form the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Foundation’s goal was to offer two versions of the board, priced at US$25 and US$35.

50 alpha boards were manufactured in August 2011. These were identical in function to what would become the model B. Assembly of twenty-five model B Beta boards occurred in December 2011. These used the same component layout as the eventual production boards.

Interest in the project increased. They were demonstrated booting Linux, playing a 1080p movie trailer and running benchmarking programs. During the first week of 2012, the first 10 boards were put up for auction on eBay. One was bought anonymously and donated to the museum at The Centre for Computing History in Suffolk, England. While the ten boards together raised over 16,000 Pounds (about $25,000 USD) the last to be auctioned (serial number No. 01) raised 3,500 Pounds by itself.

The Raspberry Pi Model B entered mass production with licensed manufacturing deals through element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Electronics. They started accepting orders for the model B on the 29th of February 2012. It was quickly apparent that they had identified a need in the marketplace. Servers struggled to cope with the load placed by watchers repeatedly refreshing their browsers. The official Raspberry Pi Twitter account reported that Premier Farnell sold out within few minutes of the initial launch. RS Components took over 100,000 pre orders on the first day of sales.

Within two years they had sold over two million units.

The lower cost model A went on sale for $25 on 4 February 2013. By that stage the Raspberry Pi was already a hit. Manufacturing of the model B hit 4000 units per day and the amount of on-board ram increased to 512MB.

The official Raspberry Pi blog reported that the three millionth Pi shipped in early May 2014. In July of that year they announced the Raspberry Pi Model B+, “the final evolution of the original Raspberry Pi. For the same price as the original Raspberry Pi model B, but incorporating numerous small improvements”. In November of the same year the even lower cost (US$20) A+ was announced. Like the A, it would have no Ethernet port, and just one USB port. But, like the B+, it would have lower power requirements, a micro-SD-card slot and 40-pin HAT compatible GPIO.

On 2 February 2015 the official Raspberry Pi blog announced that the Raspberry Pi 2 was available. It had the same form factor and connector layout as the Model B+. It had a 900 MHz quad-core ARMv7 Cortex-A7 CPU, twice the memory (for a total of 1 GB) and complete compatibility with the original generation of Raspberry Pis.

Following a meeting with Eric Schmidt (of Google fame) in 2013, Eben embarked on the design of a new form factor for the Pi. On the 26th of November 2015 the Pi Zero was released.

The Pi Zero is a significantly smaller version of a Pi with similar functionality but with a retail cost of $5. On release it sold out (20,000 units) World wide in 24 hours and a free copy was affixed to the cover of the MagPi magazine.

The Raspberry Pi 3 was released in February 2016. The most notable change being the inclusion of on-board WiFi and Bluetooth.

In February 2017 the Raspberry Pi Zero W was announced. This device had the same small form factor of the Pi Zero, but included the WiFi and Bluetooth functionality of the Raspberry Pi 3.

On Pi day (the 14th of March (Get it? 3-14?)) in 2018 the Raspberry Pi 3+ was announced. It included dual band WiFi, upgraded Bluetooth, Gigabit Ethernet and support for a future PoE card. The Ethernet speed was actually 300Mpbs since it still needs to operate on a USB2 bus. By this stage there had been over 9 million Raspberry Pi 3’s sold and 19 million Pi’s in total.

On the 24th of June 2019, the Raspberry Pi 4 was released.

This realised a true Gigabit Ethernet port and a combination of USB 2 and 3 ports. There was also a change in layout of the board with some ports being moved and it also included dual micro HDMI connectors. As well as this, the RPi 4 is available with a wide range of on-board RAM options. Power was now supplied via a USB C port.

As of the 10th of December 2019 there have been over 30 million Raspberry Pis (combined) sold.

It would be easy to consider the measurement of the success of the Raspberry Pi in the number of computer boards sold. Yet, this would most likely not be the opinion of those visionaries who began the journey to develop the boards. Their stated aim was to re-invigorate the desire of young people to experiment with computers and to have fun doing it. We can thus measure their success by the many projects, blogs and updated school curriculum’s that their efforts have produced.