You’ll get a sweet deal with this Raspberry Pi
SOMETIMES BASIC IS BEST, LIKE THIS BRILLIANT AND CHEAP COMPUTER
IT’S funny how the tech world often looks to the past when it’s inventing the future. Today we’re talking about the new Raspberry Pi – a computer built into a keyboard, that its makers hope will herald the dawn of a revolution in education.
If that sounds familiar, you are both very old and can recall the heady days of personal computing in the 80s, when most computers were built into keyboards.
Devices like Sinclair’s ZX81 and the BBC Micro were basic machines designed more to help people understand how computers work and how to program them as much as anything else.
I can’t tell you how many hours I wasted writing my own games…
Anyway, the new Raspberry Pi is built very much in that tradition. And it might just have arrived at the right time – a time when working and learning from home are becoming more commonplace and there are not enough low-cost computers to go around.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation, which makes these tiny computers, is a charity set up with to bring the power of computing to as many people as possible.
And they’re doing a pretty good job of it – they’ve sold more than 30 million computers. It’s a real British success story.
Despite that success, there was always a sense that their computers were for the more technically minded – they come as very cheap bare circuit boards with no monitor, no mouse, no keyboard… you have to set those up yourself. Until now, that is.
The new Raspberry Pi 400 is a marked change of course for the charity – it harks back to those early days of computing and looks more or less like a standalone keyboard with connection ports in the back. And it costs just £67. Almost as cheap as the ZX81 was on release.
If you want a kit with all the cables you need to set it up and a mouse, plus a handy beginners’ guide book, that costs £99 – the idea is you plug it into your TV to use as a monitor… and you’re away.
The device itself is powerful enough for most everyday tasks – it runs the Linux-based Raspberry Pi OS (no Windows or macOS here), on which you can run all kinds of
software – word processors, spreadsheets, web browsers, calendars. You can even play (or write your own!) games.
And it’s cheap, too. Which should make it easier to bring the power of computing to more homes than ever before.
■ For more about the Raspberry Pi 400, and the charity’s other devices, visit raspberrypi.org