Raspberry Pi
Computing for everyone
The Raspberry Pi brought affordable single-board computing to education and hobbyists, becoming the platform of choice for retro gaming projects.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation created an affordable single-board computer to promote computing education. The credit-card-sized boards cost as little as $35 and ran full Linux. Hobbyists adopted it for countless projects, including retro gaming: RetroPie and similar distributions turned Raspberry Pis into multi-system emulation machines.
Fast facts
- Organisation: Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- Price: from $35 (varies by model).
- OS: Raspberry Pi OS (Linux-based).
- Models: Pi 1, 2, 3, 4, 5; Zero series; Pico.
- Retro gaming: RetroPie, Recalbox, Lakka.
- Sales: tens of millions of units.
Retro gaming use
Why Raspberry Pi dominates hobbyist emulation:
- Price: affordable complete systems.
- Performance: handles up to PS1/N64 era (model dependent).
- Community: extensive guides and support.
- Form factor: fits in arcade cabinets, portable builds.
A note on what this entry is sourced from
Unusually for this Vault, almost nothing here rests on an independent source. The two items in the library that discuss the Raspberry Pi at any length are both published by the Raspberry Pi organisation itself — Computers That Made Britain by Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd, and Wireframe, “published monthly by Raspberry Pi Ltd”.
There is no independent period or trade coverage of the Pi in this corpus. The $35 price, the sales figures and the educational mission above are widely repeated and near-certainly correct, but they are not checked here, and this entry says so rather than imply otherwise.
What the holdings do support is a framing: Computers That Made Britain, writing about the kit-built machines of 1973, calls that “an era, incidentally, that was reborn by the Raspberry Pi 40 years later”. Which is the company’s own publisher drawing the line — but it is at least a line drawn in print, and it places the Pi in the British kit-computing tradition rather than outside it.
Educational mission
The original purpose:
- Programming: accessible Python, Scratch.
- Electronics: GPIO pins for hardware projects.
- Computing literacy: understanding how computers work.
- Schools: deployed in educational settings worldwide.