An extraordinary debut for the micro-computer Raspberry Pi

The micro-computer Raspberry Pi
The micro-computer Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer the size of a credit card. That’s a project started about six years ago that has now finally seen the light. Yesterday its sales started and the success has been incredible, so much that the available computers were sold very quickly. The official project website was taken down because of the excessive traffic and the sites of its partners who resell the Raspberry Pi suffered high traffic problems.

For only $25, you can have the basic model, called Model A, of the Raspberry Pi with these features:

  • Broadcom BCM2835 700MHz ARM1176JZFS processor with FPU and Videocore 4 GPU
  • GPU provides Open GL ES 2.0, hardware-accelerated OpenVG, and 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
  • GPU is capable of 1Gpixel/s, 1.5Gtexel/s or 24GFLOPs with texture filtering and DMA infrastructure
  • 256MB RAM
  • Boots from SD card, running the Fedora version of Linux
  • HDMI socket
  • USB 2.0 socket
  • RCA video socket
  • SD card socket
  • Powered from microUSB socket
  • 3.5mm audio out jack
  • Header footprint for camera connection
  • Size: 85.6 x 53.98 x 17mm

The Model B, the “luxury” one, also has an Ethernet port and 2 USB ports and costs $35. Linux is its operating system, for now the Debian, Fedora, and Arch Linux distributions. Surely over time other Linux distributions and other operating systems will be adapted to run on the Raspberry Pi hardware.

The idea behind the Raspberry Pi project is to have a cheap computer for educational purposes. In fact, Raspberry Pi Foundation’s administrator Eben Upton brought together a group of teachers, academicians and geeks such as David Braben, one of the writers of the videogame “Elite”, to design this tiny computer.

It wasn’t easy because there was a need to keep costs as low as possible but eventually the Raspberry Pi project became a reality. It was inevitable that a product like this attracted the attention of geeks all over the world but probably the project founders didn’t expect such an extraordinary success.

The production of the Raspberry Pi computers goes on and their availability will increase so anyone who wants to buy one only needs to have a little ‘patience. The story of this great little computer tells us that you don’t need a guru of communication for a technological product to have a great success and that apparently there are many people who like to tinker with micro-computers such as this one.

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