The Raspberry Pi went on sale on 29 February 2012, and so many people tried to buy one that the sales websites were overwhelmed. The BBC’s technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones later wrote that around 100,000 were sold, and that at that moment only ten had actually arrived from the factory in China, with a total of 2,000 on order. The small team behind it had built a bare circuit board the size of a credit card, costing $35, to answer a question from the 1980s: why were children no longer learning to program the way BBC Micro owners had?
Fast facts
- Made by: the Raspberry Pi Foundation, a Cambridge educational charity, and later its trading company, Raspberry Pi Ltd.
- On sale: 29 February 2012.
- Launch price: $25 to $35 depending on memory, announced in 2011; the first model went on sale in Britain at £22.
- First model: a 700 MHz ARM processor, Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics, up to 256MB of memory, HDMI and USB, and an SD card instead of a hard disk.
- Operating system: Linux, now Raspberry Pi OS.
- Sales: 30 million by December 2019, by Eben Upton’s count.
The BBC Micro gap
The idea came from Cambridge. Eben Upton, then a research student, co-founded the Raspberry Pi Foundation with encouragement from Jack Lang, a long-time lecturer at the University’s Computer Laboratory. The games developer David Braben, co-author of Elite, was one of its founding trustees. In May 2011 Braben and Upton showed Cellan-Jones a prototype the size of a USB memory stick. He filmed it on his phone, and more than 400,000 people had watched the video by the end of the weekend.
Braben explained the thinking to Edge at the end of 2011. There was, he said, “a huge gap” between editing levels in games like LittleBigPlanet and professional programming tools, “where you’ve gotta know your bananas to get engaged in it. For me, the BBC Micro crossed that gap.” He blamed school ICT lessons for missing “a generation or two”, and hoped for “a demoscene of things in BASIC or some simple language which a kid can pull apart”.
A PC, Braben argued, was the wrong machine for a classroom: “A PC is very daunting and very, very easy to mess up.” The Pi kept everything on its SD card, so a child who broke the software could start again by swapping cards. It booted to a Linux desktop, and the team had already shown it running Scratch, MIT’s programming language for beginners, on the BBC’s Newsnight.
The people who built the 1980s machines saw the connection too. In 2013 Retro Gamer found Steve Furber, who designed the BBC Micro at Acorn, excited by a computer that, like the BBC Micro, was going into schools. When Clive Sinclair died in 2021, Upton told Wireframe that “many of us owe our careers to Sir Clive, either directly, having grown up programming the Spectrum, or indirectly, having grown up with the BBC Micro”. The Pi runs on an ARM processor, a design that began at Acorn in the 1980s for the Archimedes.
The first board
The version Edge examined in December 2011 was “a developer board, naked as the day it was soldered”. It had a 700 MHz ARM11 processor, Broadcom VideoCore IV graphics that could decode 1080p video, USB and HDMI, and 128MB or 256MB of memory depending on the model, priced at $25 or $35. The headline demonstration was that it could run Quake III Arena, “but I think it’s fair to say it’s quite a way beyond that in terms of what it can do”, Braben said. There was no case, no keyboard and no screen: owners supplied their own. The development board needed a power brick, but the release version was to take power through a micro-USB socket, so an everyday phone charger would do.
A machine for emulators
A cheap computer with an HDMI socket and a USB port for a joypad was also a cheap way to play old games. The best-known package is RetroPie, a script that sets up a Raspberry Pi “with many emulators and games”, using the EmulationStation menu as its front end and RetroArch and its emulator cores underneath. Lakka, another distribution built on RetroArch, turns a small computer into a games console in the same way.
By the early 2020s the Pi had become a standard part of the hobby. Wireframe wrote in 2022 that if you “install RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 4 … you have a solid emulation machine”. Its December 2021 issue showed readers how to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W, a battery and a charging board inside an ordinary SNES-style joypad, to make a complete console that plugs into a television. Pis turned up in stranger places too. Dale Whinham’s mt32-pi turns a Zero 2 W into an emulated Roland MT-32, a sound module from 1987, which can be plugged into a MiSTer to play a game’s MIDI soundtrack. The Accelerated model of the ZX Spectrum Next has a Raspberry Pi Zero inside it as a co-processor.
Raspberry Pi’s own publishing arm joined in, with a book called Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi, in a second edition by 2022, and Wireframe, a games magazine it has published since its first issue in November 2018.
Later history
The Pi went through several generations: the Raspberry Pi 4, the Raspberry Pi 400 built into a keyboard, the tiny Zero models and, by 2021, the Pico, a microcontroller board rather than a full computer. In December 2019 Upton wrote on Twitter that “we sold our thirty-millionth unit some time last week (we think Tuesday)”. Tim Danton’s Computers That Made Britain, published by Raspberry Pi’s own trading company, calls it “the best-selling British computer of all time”.
The Raspberry Pi 5 was announced on 28 September 2023 at $60 for 4GB of memory and $80 for 8GB. The company said it had “made and sold over 14 million units of Raspberry Pi 4” in the previous four years, and that its flagship boards were built at the Sony UK Technology Centre in Pencoed, South Wales. In June 2024 the trading company listed on the London Stock Exchange as Raspberry Pi Holdings.
Sources
- Rory Cellan-Jones, “Chapter 4: Raspberry Pi”, 12 May 2021 (web, secondary): the May 2011 video and its 400,000 views; the launch on 29 February 2012; around 100,000 sold, ten delivered and 2,000 ordered. https://rorycellanjones.substack.com/p/chapter-4-raspberry-pi
- “Easy As Raspberry Pi” and “Q&A: David Braben”, Edge issue 235, Christmas 2011, pp. 84–88: the specification, prices and memory, the SD card, Linux and LXDE, Scratch, Quake III Arena, and Braben’s quotes.
- Retro Gamer issue 116, July 2013, p. 47, feature on Steve Furber: Furber on the Raspberry Pi and its use in schools.
- “Uncle Clive’s Greatest Hit: the ZX Spectrum”, Wireframe issue 56, October 2021, p. 35, a tribute to the late Sir Clive Sinclair: Eben Upton’s comment.
- Tim Danton, Computers That Made Britain (Raspberry Pi Trading Ltd, 2021), “Acorn Archimedes” chapter and epilogue: the Pi’s ARM lineage from the Archimedes; Upton and Jack Lang; the £22 launch price; Upton’s thirty-millionth-unit tweet of 14 December 2019; “best-selling British computer”. Its publisher is Raspberry Pi’s own trading company.
- Frontier Developments plc, “Director Biographies and Committees” (web, secondary): Braben as one of the founders of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. https://www.frontier.co.uk/investors/director-biographies-and-committees
- RetroPie-Setup README, GitHub (web, secondary): what RetroPie installs. https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup
- Lakka website (web, secondary): Lakka as a RetroArch distribution. https://www.lakka.tv/
- David Crookes, “The FPGA retro revolution”, Wireframe issue 61, March 2022, pp. 28–33: RetroPie on a Raspberry Pi 4, Dale Whinham’s mt32-pi and the MT-32. Wireframe is published by Raspberry Pi Ltd.
- Ryan Lambie, “Make a complete RetroPie console in a joypad”, Wireframe issue 58, December 2021, pp. 58–63: the Zero 2 W joypad build.
- Wireframe issue 1, November 2018: masthead. Wireframe issue 51, May 2021: the Raspberry Pi Pico. Wireframe issue 61, March 2022: the Raspberry Pi 400. Wireframe issues 59 and 61, 2022: advertisements for Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi, second edition.
- ZX Spectrum Next User Manual (SpecNext), chapter 1: the Accelerated model’s Raspberry Pi Zero.
- Raspberry Pi, “Introducing: Raspberry Pi 5!”, 28 September 2023 (web, secondary): prices, Raspberry Pi 4 sales, manufacture at Pencoed. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
- Wikipedia, “Raspberry Pi” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the Model B at $35 on 29 February 2012; the listing as Raspberry Pi Holdings in June 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi