From the first vacuum tube computers to the tape and punch card machines of the 1960s and the first microprocessor mainframes of the 1970s, computing had very much been the preserve of large businesses and the research departments of universities. However, by the late 1970s, with the release of Apple II and seeds planted earlier by technologies such as the TV Typewriter and Apple I, this was rapidly changing.
By the 1980s, the public could buy low-cost home computers, such as the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64, which hit the market and subsequently gave birth to a whole generation of amateur programmers. By the 1990s, these programmers, brought up on tinkering with their home computers and writing BASIC, were heading to academia and the computer industry, and helping to forge the dot-com boom with game, web, and business technologies.
The genesis of the Raspberry Pi is linked to this in many ways. A group of computer scientists led by Eben Upton at the University of Cambridge's computer laboratory in 2006 struck upon the idea of producing a cheap, educational microcomputer geared towards amateur computer enthusiasts, budding students, and children. The aim was to help provide the skills for future computer science undergraduate applicants that many of the applicants in the 1990s possessed. This was largely because home computers of the 1980s required programming and were open to hacking.
However, it would be another two years before the project became viable, and until 2012 before the Raspberry Pi was being shipped to the public.
The 2000s saw a huge growth in mobile computing technologies, a large segment of which was being driven by the mobile phone industry. By 2005, ARM—a British designer of CPU core components and by-product of the 1980s' home computer company Acorn—had grown to a state where 98 percent of mobile phones were using their technology. This translated into around 1 billion CPU cores. ARM technology later ended up featuring on the Raspberry Pi, with the ARM1176JZF-S processor core being used as a part of the Broadcom BCM2835 System-on-a-Chip (SoC).
During the same period, Eben Upton designed several concepts for the Raspberry Pi, and by 2008, thanks to a by-product of the increasing penetration of mobile phone technology, the cost of building a miniature, portable microcomputer, with many of the multimedia functions that the public was accustomed to, was becoming viable. Thus, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was formed to develop and manufacture the Raspberry Pi computer.
By 2011, the first Alpha Models were being produced and tested, and the public finally got to see what the Raspberry Pi was capable of. Demos of Quake III Arena and full HD 1080px video showed that the tiny computer could pack a big punch for low cost.
Finally in 2012, the Raspberry Pi was ready for public consumption. Two versions of the Raspberry Pi were manufactured, namely Model A and Model B, with B being released first.
Over the subsequent years, both A and B were upgraded, with the Models A+ and B+ being release and this was complemented with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi 2 in 2015.
For the projects in this book, you will need to use at least a Model B version of the board, or the more powerful Model B+ or Raspberry Pi 2 Model B if available.
Next, let's learn about the Arduino platform.