Inexpensive hardware and a strong community bring to mind the early days of Linux

Pioneer Computing

Article from Issue 143/2012
Author(s):

The sudden popularity of miniboard systems like Raspberry Pi have brought back the pioneering spirit of Linux’s early days. Suddenly, “do it yourself” in the open source community is back.

By now, most people of the geek persuasion have heard of the Raspberry Pi, but just in case you haven’t, here’s the nickel tour.

Raspberry Pi got its start in 2006, when a bunch of people in the University of Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory in the United Kingdom were looking at the declining computer skills they were seeing in A Level students coming into their program. What they were seeing was not good, and it was a trend they could see being repeated in other nations besides the UK.

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