It's Raspberry Pi Time
Mon, 05 Mar 2012
It's not often something comes along that causes more fuss on the internet than Apple's latest offering but despite the imminent arrival of the iPad 3 the new Raspberry Pi computer is definitely grabbing the limelight at the moment. So why all the interest in this little computer?
Well, the first thing you notice is that it's cheap - very cheap. For just £25 it aims to provide you with a fully-fedged computer that will run a real operating system.
Part of this cost saving is down to the fact that you can plug it in to your TV instead of buying a monitor. You'll also need to provide your own USB keyboard and mouse since these are not included. What's more it doesn't come with a hard drive - instead you'll need to use a cheap SD card to give the computer some storage. RAM is limited to 256Mb and the processor is more like the one you find in your smartphone rather than a desktop PC. In fact, the whole device has more in common with mobile phone hardware than the typical home computer.
You may be thinking that the device sounds is rather limited. Well yes it is (remember, it only costs £25!), but Smartphone level computers are actually pretty powerful devices these days. If you run a efficient operating system on them (such as Raspberry Pi's Debian Linux) and include a decent graphics chip (like the Raspberry Pi has) you will indeed have a computer that will do most of the things we use current desktop computers for - web browsing, email, document editing and - within reason - gaming.
However, despite being capable enough, the Raspberry Pi is not really intended to be a cheap way of doing these sorts of things. Instead, the goal of the project is to ignite interest in computer programming and computer hardware development.
People my age who became interested in computers did so using the equivalent of stripped-down simple computers like the Raspberry Pi. The Acorn and Sinclair computers of my youth had only a fraction of the power of 'professional' computers of the time, but there were relatively cheap and most important of all they were straightforward to program. They were also very hackable. I remember soldering wires directly on the the board of my beloved ZX80 and building my own hardware voice synthesiser!
With the industry focus on ever increasing processing power to support ever larger operating systems and games, and young people being taught how to use applications rather than programming, the makers of the Raspberry Pi believe computing has lost something since those days.
Raspberry Pi hope that their device will get people doing real computing again. It's priced at the level of a textbook and hopefully every school pupil will one day have access to one.
A community is already starting to develop around the device and there seems to be a huge demand for the hardware. I've been lucky enough to get my order in and when it arrives I look forward to getting coding on it. I'll no doubt report back here once I have.
