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Everyone wants to get a piece of Raspberry Pi: Tiny pounds 22 British computer sells out immediately Device designed to teach children how to program(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) A tiny new British-designed computer that costs just pounds 22 went on sale at 6am yesterday - and immediately sold out, crashing the websites selling it in the process. The Raspberry Pi is intended to inspire a new generation of schoolchildren to learn to program, just as in the 1980s the Sinclair Spectrum and BBC Micro created a groundswell of home programmers, leading to the burgeoning UK games sector and other computing breakthroughs. As small as a credit card, the first versions of the Raspberry Pi are intended to go to developers who will write software that people can use to write their own programs. Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, the charity behind the scheme, said the idea is to give one away to every child so that they can do their own programming - and learn to control computers, rather than be controlled by them. The devices, which have taken six years to develop and are being sold through the components companies RS and Farnell, have a USB port for a keyboard, Ethernet port, SD card slot, and an HDMI port for video output. Users will have to supply their own keyboard and screen, or plug into a TV set. At the heart of the Raspberry Pi is an ARM chip, like that found in mobile phones and tablets, and it runs a version of the free Linux open-source operating system, found in many web servers and in Android smartphones. Upton, an engineer with the chip company Broadcom, says he got the ideawhen he found that applicants for degree course places "[didn't] seem to know enough about what a computer really was or how it worked . . . I found it worrying. "What was needed was a return to an exciting, programmable machine like the old BBC Micro; and it had to be affordable, say around pounds 20, so every child could potentially have one." In a statement to go with the launch, he said: "The decline in core computing skills is something we really want to address with Raspberry Pi. Overcoming students' fear of programming for the first time is a critical step in unlocking the full potential of the smartest people in any industry." The education secretary, Michael Gove, has said that the computing curriculum will change later this year - a move that follows the Guardian's Digital Literacy campaign to make programming more central to school learning. That could open huge opportunities for the new cheap computer in schools around the country. The idea for the device came from David Braben, a video game veteran who wanted to inspire young users to program. Leader comment, page 32 = Captions: Pupils at the King's School, Chester, try out the Raspberry Pi, seen below in close-up Photograph: Christopher Thomond (c) 2012 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |