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Raspberry Pi Passes 10m Sales Mark

posted by martyb on Friday September 09 2016, @07:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the 10-meters? dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

The Raspberry Pi has sold 10 million units - continuing its success as the most popular British computer ever.

The computer, about the same size as a credit card, was first released in 2012 and is widely used as an educational tool for programming.

However, it can also be used for many practical purposes such as streaming music to several devices in a house.

A new starter kit for Raspberry Pi, including a keyboard and mouse, has been released to celebrate the success.

The kit also includes an SD storage card, official case, power supply, HDMI cable, mouse, keyboard and guidebook - it costs £99 plus VAT and will be available in the coming weeks.

Congratulations and thanks to Eben Upton and the Raspberry Pi Foundation for getting a whole new generation of kids interested in computing and reigniting passion for technology among old curmudgeonly techies.

Also reported here.

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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TheRaven on Friday September 09 2016, @11:51AM

    by TheRaven (270) on Friday September 09 2016, @11:51AM (#399573) Journal
    The BBC Micro, which inspired the Raspberry Pi, cost £235 for the cheap model in 1981 pounds, and everyone bought the £335 model (I never saw a Model A as a child, people either bought the Model B or an entirely different computer). That works out at £1,298.23, inflation adjusted. The starter kit, at £99, sounds pretty good in comparison (though I'd argue that the BBC Model B is still a better teaching platform than the Pi, even today).
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by tibman on Friday September 09 2016, @03:04PM

    by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 09 2016, @03:04PM (#399636)

    Here's a Z80 kit for ~90$ - https://www.tindie.com/products/Semachthemonkey/rc2014-homebrew-z80-computer-kit/ [tindie.com]

    The big difference being that the RPi kit involves plugging different parts together and something like the Z80 requires hours of soldering and it might not work. I'm with you that an inferior system might actually teach more.

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    • (Score: 2) by theluggage on Friday September 09 2016, @05:18PM

      by theluggage (1797) on Friday September 09 2016, @05:18PM (#399706)

      Here's a Z80 kit for ~90$

      I know its a nerd project for nerds to do so that they've done it, and I salute that, but for maximum amusement, scroll down to the bit about the serial terminal board that adds a video & keyboard to the (serial only) Z80 board... yes folks, its done by plugging in a Raspberry Pi Zero (which could probably emulate the Z80 faster than the real thing runs)... and I bet it still works out far cheaper than adding a "proper" (?) video/keyboard interface.

      In electronics, volume production is everything...

      • (Score: 2) by tibman on Friday September 09 2016, @05:27PM

        by tibman (134) Subscriber Badge on Friday September 09 2016, @05:27PM (#399717)

        lol! Retrocomputing, where your decoding logic is a microprocessor that is 100x faster than your main CPU.

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    • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Saturday September 10 2016, @05:01PM

      by TheRaven (270) on Saturday September 10 2016, @05:01PM (#400033) Journal

      I'm with you that an inferior system might actually teach more.

      It's not that the BBC is inferior, it's that it was carefully designed for teaching computing. You turn on the BBC and you're immediately at a prompt that you can type a program into and run individual lines of BASIC as a REPL. The dialect of BASIC that it used had full support for structured programming, a built-in assembler (you could generate strings in BASIC and assemble them), several graphics modes, multi-channel sound, and direct access to memory (importantly, I/O memory). It also had a range of I/O ports that were very easy to use from BASIC.

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