Raspberry Pi

Tony Duell wrote on Sun, 3 Mar 2013 20:37:31 +0000 (GMT): The project's creators have told the story many times, but have yet to reach a wider audience so this is a fair comment. Here is what they claim: Comparing the the group of students applying for computer science at the University of Cambridge in 2005 with those who had applied in 1995 they noted that there were half as many and that they didn't know how to program while those in the older group did. This seemed odd given that the younger generation had grown up in a world where computers were so much more common, but the cheapest computers in the first half of the 1980s cost $100 and were practically useless for anything except programming in Basic while the cheapest computers in the first half of the 1990s cost $2000 and didn't have a built-in language, but did have a huge software library. The $2000 PC was a complete system, while the $100 computer was just the machine itself, but the comparison isn't totally unfair if you could find the rest for "free" around the house, like a TV set and a tape recorder. So the point of the Raspberry Pi is to give today's children what the 1995 group had had and the 2005 didn't and see if they could reverse the trend they had observed. If they machine is also interesting to other people and for other reasons, then so much the better. But none of those other reasons are the point. A great way of seeing what the project is all about is to read the magazine dedicated to it: http://www.themagpi.com/ One great way to miss the point is to focus on technical issues. It doesn't matter at all that some other boards have better features or offer a better value. Like the Arduino, this is about the community around the product much more than about the product itself. -- Jecel