Raspberry Pi's Eben Upton: How We're Turning Everyone Into DIY Hackers 90
redletterdave writes "Eben Upton is the CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation's trading company, where he oversees production and sales of the Raspberry Pi. In a lengthy interview with ReadWrite, Upton shares how he invented Raspberry Pi, and what's coming next for the $35 microcomputer. Quoting: 'There's a big difference between [just] making a platform like Raspberry Pi available and offering support for it. I think if you just make it available, you'll find one percent of eight-year-olds will be the one percent who love that sort of thing and will get into it, regardless of how much or how little support you give them. ... [S]ince we can afford to pay for the development of educational material, we can afford to advocate for good training for teachers throughout this. There's an opportunity to get more than one percent. There's an opportunity to reach the bright kids who don't quite have the natural inclination to personally tackle complicated technical tasks. If you give them good teaching and compelling material that's relevant and interesting to them, you can reach ten percent, twenty percent, fifty percent, many more. We look back to the 1980s as this golden era [of learning to program], and in practice, only a very few percent of people were learning to program to any great degree. ... I think the real opportunity for us now, because we can intervene on the material and teacher training levels, we can potentially blow past where we were in the 1980s.'"
It's not the thing... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:It's not the thing... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not the thing that matters. There are faster, cheaper boards than the Pi. But the community, with examples and workarounds so that the changes are you don't have to beat a path, but just hit google.
There's a faster, cheaper board than the Pi? I've seen similar boards with less power/io at a slightly cheaper price, and I've seen more powerful boards with less IO that are significantly more expensive. But I've yet to see a cheaper AND faster board than the PI with similar IO. Could you link me please?
Am I getting old? (Score:4, Interesting)
There was a time I would have jumped at playing with a Pi, and I did take a look into using it as a media device like he mentions in the article. I looked at what it was capable of and what I'd have to do to get it to do what I wanted vs. building a media PC around XBMC... and bought a Roku instead. I just couldn't be bothered. I still love tinkering with stuff programming-wise, but I've completely lost my ambition to tinker with hardware. Am I just old, or what?
Re:Am I getting old? (Score:5, Interesting)
But then it's more powerful than the Minicomputers I started on in the late 70's
Re:Am I getting old? (Score:3, Interesting)
Eventually your kids'll get old enough that hardware tinkering will be back on the radar -- with the added benefit that you'll be doing it with someone who looks up to you :) Only lasts a few years though.