9 Lessons The Tech World Learned In 2012
LESSON 7: Raspberries Pi became a cherished favor
Now it’s a story that has all element of pulp fiction. A few years ago, Eben Upton and some of his academic colleagues in Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory became concerned about the fact that most of the students who wanted to study computer science no longer knew how to program.
They came up with the indigenous idea to designing a small, cheap computer that they could give to prospective students and later interview them about what they did with the device. Based up how good the students used this device they got admissions into the prestigious university.
This idea later grew in to a hurricane, "We thought we'd make maybe a few hundred of these devices," Upton wrote later, "or, best case, a lifetime production run of a few thousand." The device which was christened as Raspberry Pi, when it went on sale, the demand crashed the servers of the two major online retailers that had signed up to sell it. To date, it has sold more than 800,000 units and stands as an astonishing rebuke to the skeptics who said that in these days of iDevices and tablets there was no market for a device that ran Linux and simply sat blinking at you when you switched it on.
