Welcome...
Last night I had the pleasure of attending a lecture hosted by Pete Lomas, co-creator and trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. We learnt about how the Raspberry Pi came to be, and the conversation Pete had with fellow founding member Alan Mycroft while walking through Hyde Park one lunchtime, which focused on the lack of education for Cambridge University’s Computer Science applicants. These students had been taught the theory, but lacked the practical experience of writing code to requirements and debugging software problems.
Pete also explained the founders’ investments were used to pay for the initial batch of Raspberry Pi, and how they were tested, a few days before Christmas in 2011, only to find a hardware bug which was solved by 1mm of solder to connect the CPU to the power. The Raspberry Pi was almost a non-starter, on the brink of being condemned to the unfinished projects bin of a certain Eben Upton.
But once the Raspberry Pi was ready for development, the task of putting Linux on the Pi fell to the development team of the time, an early Christmas present delivered for them to tinker with.
So as you can see there were many times when the Raspberry Pi may have simply disappeared and become another failed tech startup, but those behind the scenes kept working and trying new ideas.
So what is the motto of this story? Chance meetings, discussing problems and sharing ideas can lead to greater things. Be open with your thoughts as well as your code.