Happy Birthday: Raspberry Pi celebrates 10th anniversary

Shawn Knight

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Editor's take: The Raspberry Pi foundation is celebrating a decade of shipping affordable, single-board computers. It's hard to believe that 10 years have passed since, especially considering the journey to get to launch day started roughly six years earlier.

On February 29, 2012, the foundation started accepting orders for its revolutionary $35 microcomputer. The Raspberry Pi sold out within hours, and by the time the team started celebrating with drinks in the pub that evening, launch partners Farnell and RS Components had collectively taken more than 100,000 orders.

The original Model B featured a 700 MHz ARM11 processor alongside 512 MB of RAM. Real world performance was said to be equivalent to a Pentium II 300 MHz with graphics capabilities closer to the original Xbox.

It took the foundation just one year to sell its first million units, and they haven't looked back since.

Several iterations have followed, the last of which is the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W that hit the market in late 2021. Today, Raspberry Pi is the UK’s best-selling computer with over 45 million units sold. The foundation is a leading educational non-profit and one of the top players in STEM education.

To commemorate the milestone, the foundation has partnered with The National Museum of Computing to launch a temporary exhibit that tells the story of the Raspberry Pi. The exhibit opens this weekend and the ceremony will be streamed live on the Internet on March 5 at 11:15 a.m. GMT.

Image credit: Harrison Broadbent

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I got the 4GB RaspPi model 4B, that thing is a little beast for $60. If all you need is a computer to do basic office work, browse the internet and stream video, it's more than enough.
 
Did the foundation really made it a point to celebrate how they haven't been able to reach the price points they wanted, a key part of their popularity, for months now?

Who cares, celebrate 11 or 12 years instead instead of reminding people "Yeah you used to be able to get really cheap, low powered computers. Now they're 300 to 500% inflated in price if you can even find them for sale!"

Read the %^(@!#$ room next time.
 
Did the foundation really made it a point to celebrate how they haven't been able to reach the price points they wanted, a key part of their popularity, for months now?

Who cares, celebrate 11 or 12 years instead instead of reminding people "Yeah you used to be able to get really cheap, low powered computers. Now they're 300 to 500% inflated in price if you can even find them for sale!"

Read the %^(@!#$ room next time.

Sorry, but that's a really, really petty response given what they have achieved in opening up computing to vast swathes of people around the globe who would otherwise not have had the chance.

Judging prices from a 1st world perspective really misses the point of what/why the Pi team started the project.

 
Still one of the best ARM devices if you want to run ARM based Linux apps.

Great for a cheap emulation device.

Great for a headless Linux Server over SSH.

 
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