Raspberry Pi a $30 Computer Set to Revolutionize the Teaching of Computing

An innovative new single board computer has been launched in the UK by the Raspberry Foundation, a charity based in England. This credit card size device is set to revolutionize the study of computer science within schools and will allow children to have cheap and easy access to code learning. It is hoped that this will have a huge impact on computing science skills within the education system.
This single board computer is centred around a Broadcom BCM2835 System on a chip, and includes a VideoCore IVGPU, a 700MHz processor and 256MB of RAM.

The Raspberry Pi which is designed to run on on Linux Kernel,an open source operating system, but can also support BBC BASIC, C, Python and PERL. The device can be linked to a computer monitor, there are extra ports which may be used for peripherals such as a mouse and a keyboard.
The device does not have a real-time clock. so an operating system uses a network time server, or asks user for time information on booting to get access for date stamping and file time. A real-time clock with power backup can be linked via the I2C interface.

The Raspberry Pi has no solid state disc or hard drive, but employs an SD card for storage and booting.
The Raspberry Pi will run video at full 1080p resolution making it a useful and very affordable media centre, ulitilizing XBMC media streaming software.

The first batch of 10,000 devices went on sale at the end of February 2012, and were sold out within minutes, the heavy traffic caused the retailers web sites to crash.
More units are being manufactured in China and Japan, and after the initial backlog of pre orders are cleared the units will be built in real time to keep up with the expected tsunami of demand.

The Raspberry foundadtion is a chaity based in Cambridge in England: set up by a team of academics from Cambridge University headed by Eben Upton who were concerned about the quality of computing science teaching within high schools, and the falling numbers of undergraduates applying to computing science degrees.