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I N T R O D U C T I O N
7
We blog something interesting about the device at
www.raspberrypi.org
at least once
every day. Come and join in the conversation!
There were 100,000 people on our mailing list wanting a Raspberry Pi—and they all put an
order in on day one! Not surprisingly, this brought up a few issues.
First off, there are the inevitable paper cuts you’re going to get boxing up 100,000 little com-
puters and mailing them out—and the fact was that we had absolutely no money to hire
people to do this for us. We didn’t have a warehouse—we had Jack’s garage. There was no
way we could raise the money to build 100,000 units at once—we’d envisaged making them
in batches of 2,000 every couple of weeks, which, with this level of interest, was going to take
so long that the thing would be obsolete before we managed to fulfil all the orders. Clearly,
manufacturing and distribution were something we were going to have to give up on and
Our Community
The Raspberry Pi community is one of the things we’re proudest of. We started with a very
bare-bones blog at
www.raspberrypi.org
just after Rory’s May 2011 video, and put up a
forum on the same website shortly after that. That forum now has more than 60,000 mem-
bers—between them they’ve contributed nearly 400,000 posts of wit and wisdom about
the Raspberry Pi. If there’s any question, no matter how abstruse, that you want to ask
about the Raspberry Pi or about programming in general, someone there will have the
answer (if it’s not in this book, you’ll find it in the forums).
Part of my job at Raspberry Pi involves giving talks to hacker groups, computing confer-
ences, teachers, programming collectives and the like, and there’s always someone in the
audience who has talked to me or to my wife Liz (who runs the community) on the Raspberry
Pi website—and some of these people have become good friends of ours. The Raspberry
Pi website gets more than one request every single second of the day.
There are now hundreds of fan sites out there. There’s also a fan magazine called The
MagPi (a free download from
www.themagpi.com
), which is produced monthly by com-
munity members, with type-in listings, lots of articles, project guides, tutorials and more.
Type-in games in magazines and books provided an easy route into programming for me—
my earliest programming experience with the BBC Micro was of modifying a type-in heli-
copter game to add enemies and pick-ups.