The Raspberry Pi Foundation celebrates its 10th anniversary:
Almost exactly ten years ago today, thousands of you set your alarms, and woke on leap-day morning to discover that we’d started selling Raspberry Pi computers. By the time our all-volunteer team gathered in the pub that evening for celebratory drinks, our licensees Farnell and RS Components had taken over 100,000 orders (despite struggling to keep their websites online under the load); we had (briefly) out-trended Lady Gaga; and Raspberry Pi was on the road to becoming a little larger than we’d planned.
A group of us had founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation in 2008, aiming to reverse the decline in applications to study Computer Science at Cambridge by providing young people with a fun, robust, low-cost computer with which they could learn to program. In May of 2011, we demoed a prototype to Rory Cellan-Jones at the BBC; the surprise popularity of his ensuing blog post was the shot in the arm we needed to get the project over the finish line.