>> Just look, looking around in 2005, 2006,
at the number of people applying to
study computer science, and just this sudden horrible realization
that we had driven off a cliff.
And, you know, kind of like Wile E Coyote, you know, we'd driven, we'd gone off
a cliff, and now we look down, and, yeah, we're in real trouble.
So, so, yeah, it was just trying to
eke our way back towards that 1980s world, in which every
child who had wanted to be a computer programmer
had a machine that they could use to learn on.
Then there was this period of three or four years, five years, where we were just
kind of grinding through iterating different, first of
all iterating different processor architecture choices, different vendors.
So we started off with something that actually looked a lot like an Arduino.
Turns out you can take one of those. We wanted it to be
a real computer, we wanted it to be a computer with a user interface.
And it turns out you can take those microcontrollers that are in,
in the Arduino, and you can make them
generate a video signal if you, if you clock them hard enough
and you write the right software for them.
You can make them generate a
component video, a standard-definition component video signal.
And so we started off.
I had a, I still have it, it's a piece of
aeroboard which is about that sort of size,
which has a, an Atmel chip on it and a block of SRAM.
And it gives you actually a very kind of a 1980s computer experience.
And the lovely thing about it is
because they're all 0.1-inch through hole components,
you can build it yourself, you can build it in
it takes about an afternoon, a rainy afternoon.
You can go in with a piece of aeroboard and
some chips come out with a, come out with a computer.
And that seemed like a really nice idea, but when you take it and
you show it to children, what you'll find is they're not really, it's not exciting.
You know, it's not contemporary.
It's not, it's not modern.
You know, people, those computers we got in 1980s,
we didn't necessarily get them to learn to program on.
We got them to play games on, to, got them to do other things with.
And they just, wheedled their way into our lives.
Right?
They, they, they snuck into our lives and
once they were in our lives, then we learned to program.
We didn't necessarily get them.
Yeah, and so, so really I think probably most of that
five-year journey was about seeing if we could reconcile
the idea of a $25 computer with a, with a
feature set that would make it attractive to a modern child.
And another thing we found with all of these,
with that and with some subsequent architectures we tried,
what we found, all of which were based on
kind of very special-purpose pieces of hardware, you know.
What we found was we were having to everything ourselves.
So we were, we were writing our own SD card drivers,
and our own terminal software, and our own keyboard drivers.
And, you know, you end up doing an enormous
amount of work because you've chosen to, you have cheaped
out on some aspect of the hobby.
You're using some, some wacky DSP as your, your processor.
You're writing this giant software stack yourself.
And it was only really at the point where we, getting, from
a point where we put an arm, we were lucky enough.
So I, my day job for most of that period has been working for,
working for a company called
Broadcom, they're a big famous semiconductor company.
We make chips for communications. Pretty much every communications
application has a, has a, has a Broadcom chip.
And you know, we were, we're looking, we were looking at a range,
we took the Raspberry Pi concept through a series of
Broadcom chips, seeing whether we could get something compelling.
And we were very lucky that towards the end of that period,
one of these chips ended up with an arm in it.
So we made that leap from a, from the special-purpose world with us doing all
the work into a very general-purpose world
where really what we're making is an arm-like Xbox.
And so we, we're a not-for-profit.
You know, our funding came from a couple of us
throwing money in a hat, you know, quite a lot of
money in a hat, but you know, it was quite a big hat.
But you know, it was, that seemed seemed appropriate.
But the thing that was really surprising to us after we announced in 2011 after it
kind of almost leaked out, it was just kind of a slip of the tongue, you know.
[LAUGH] We didn't, so we were surprised by the level of interest.
And it became apparent to us that we
really weren't going to be able to manufacture these.
We weren't going to be able to manufacture them in anything like
the numbers that were going to be required to suit the demand.
And that's why, you come see us, if you go look back
at our web site, you see us in 2011 talking all about manufacturing.
