Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
History of the Raspberry Pi
Any new product goes through many iterations before mass production. In the
case of the Raspberry Pi, it all began in 2006 when several concept versions of the
Raspberry Pi based on the Atmel 8-bit ATMega664 microcontroller were developed.
Another concept based on a USB memory stick with an ARM processor (similar to
what is used in the current Raspberry Pi) was created after that. It took six years of
hardware development to create the Raspberry Pi that we know and love today!
The official logo of the Raspberry Pi is shown in the following screenshot:
It wasn't until August 2011 when 50 boards of the Alpha version of the Raspberry
Pi were built. These boards were slightly larger than the current version to allow
the Raspberry Pi Foundation, to debug the device and confirm that it would all
work as expected. Twenty-five beta versions of the Raspberry Pi were assembled in
December 2011 and auctioned to raise money for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Only
a single small error with these was found and corrected for the first production run.
The first production run consisted of 10,000 boards of Raspberry Pi manufactured
overseas in China and Taiwan. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the Ethernet
jack on the Raspberry Pi being incorrectly substituted with an incompatible part. This
led to some minor shipping delays, but all the Raspberry Pi boards were delivered
within weeks of their due date. As a bonus, the foundation was able to upgrade the
Model A Raspberry Pi to 256 MB of RAM instead of the 128 MB that was planned.
This upgrade in memory size allowed the Raspberry Pi to perform even more
amazing tasks, such as real-time image processing.
