Raspberry Pi A, User Manual, Page: 21 / 314

I N T R O D U C T I O N
5
In my new role as a chip architect at Broadcom, a big semiconductor company, I had access to
inexpensive but high-performing hardware produced by the company with the intention of
being used in very high-end mobile phones—the sort with the HD video and the 14-mega-
pixel cameras. I was amazed by the difference between the chips you could buy for $10 as a
small developer, and what you could buy as a cell-phone manufacturer for roughly the same
amount of money: general purpose processing, 3D graphics, video and memory bundled into
a single BGA package the size of a fingernail. These microchips consume very little power,
and have big capabilities. They are especially good at multimedia, and were already being
used by set-top box companies to play high-definition video. A chip like this seemed the
obvious next step for the shape the Raspberry Pi was taking, so I worked on taping out a low-
cost variant that had an ARM microprocessor on board and could handle the processing
grunt we needed.
We felt it was important to have a way to get kids enthusiastic about using a Raspberry Pi
even if they didn’t feel very enthusiastic about programming. In the 1980s, if you wanted to
play a computer game, you had to boot up a box that went “bing” and fed you a command
prompt. It required typing a little bit of code just to get started, and most users didn’t ever go
beyond that—but some did, and got beguiled into learning how to program by that little bit
of interaction. We realised that the Raspberry Pi could work as a very capable, very tiny, very
cheap modern media centre, so we emphasised that capability to suck in the unwary—with
the hope that they’d pick up some programming while they’re at it.
After about five years’ hard grind, we had created a very cute prototype board, about the size
of a thumb drive. We included a permanent camera module on top of the board to demon-
strate the sort of peripherals that can easily be added (there was no camera when we launched
because it brought the price up too much, but we’ve now made a separate, cheap camera
module available for photography projects), and brought it along to a number of meetings
with the BBC’s R&D department. Those of us who grew up in the UK in the 1980s had
learned a lot about 8-bit computing from the BBC Microcomputer and the ecosystem that
had grown up around it—with BBC-produced books, magazines and TV programmes—so I’d
hoped that they might be interested in developing the Raspberry Pi further. But as it turned
out, something has changed since we were kids: various competition laws in the UK and the
EU meant that “the Beeb” couldn’t become involved in the way we’d hoped. In a last-ditch
attempt to get
something organised with them, we ditched the R&D department idea and
David (he of the giant address book) organised a meeting with Rory Cellan-Jones, a senior
tech journalist, in May 2011. Rory didn’t hold out much hope for partnership with the BBC,
but he did ask if he could take a video of the little prototype board with his phone, to put on
his blog.