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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