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Raspberry Pi
The $35 Computer That Took Over the World
14 min read
#raspberrypi, #os

The Origin Story

In the late 2000s, Eben Upton was working at the University of Cambridge and noticed something troubling: the students arriving to study computer science were getting worse. Not dumber — just less hands-on. The generation that had grown up tinkering with BBC Micros and Commodore 64s had been replaced by a generation that used computers but never really touched them.

His response was to build the cheapest, most accessible real computer he could. Something a kid could buy with birthday money, break without consequence, and learn on without permission from anyone. In 2012, the Raspberry Pi Foundation — a UK non-profit — shipped the first Raspberry Pi Model B. It cost $35. It had 256MB of RAM, a 700MHz ARM processor, and no case. It looked like someone had dropped a circuit board in your lap and said "have fun."

Over sixty million units later, it's the third best-selling general-purpose computer in history, behind only the PC and the Mac.

Nobody saw that coming. Including Eben Upton.

What It Actually Is

A Raspberry Pi is a fully functional computer on a single circuit board roughly the size of a credit card. It runs a real operating system, connects to a real monitor, runs real software, and browses the real internet. It just does all of that for significantly less money than anything else on the market.

The current flagship, the Raspberry Pi 5 (2023), is genuinely fast:

Spec Raspberry Pi 5
CPU Arm Cortex-A76, quad-core 2.4GHz
RAM 4GB, 8GB, or 16GB LPDDR4X
Storage microSD + PCIe M.2 SSD support (via M.2 HAT+)
USB 2× USB 3.0, 2× USB 2.0
Video 2× 4K HDMI output
Network Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 5, Bluetooth 5.0
GPIO 40-pin header
Price $60 (4GB) / $80 (8GB)

But the Pi family spans a wide range. The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W delivers a surprising amount of capability for $15. The Raspberry Pi 4 (2GB) remains a workhorse at $35. There's a Pi for every budget and application.

Raspberry Pi OS (Formerly Raspbian)

The official operating system started life as Raspbian — a community port of Debian Linux optimized for the Pi's ARM processor. In 2020 the Raspberry Pi Foundation officially adopted it, renamed it Raspberry Pi OS, and took over maintenance.

Under the hood it's still Debian. Every apt package, every bash script, every tool you know from any Linux system works exactly the same way. The Pi OS layer adds hardware-specific optimizations, a polished desktop environment, and a set of pre-installed tools aimed at education and development.

It comes in three flavors:

Edition What It Is
Raspberry Pi OS Lite No desktop. Terminal only. Minimal footprint. Perfect for servers and embedded projects.
Raspberry Pi OS Full desktop with the Wayfire compositor. Recommended for general use.
Raspberry Pi OS Full Desktop plus the full suite of educational and development software.

First boot setup is handled by the Raspberry Pi Imager — write your chosen OS to a microSD card, configure Wi-Fi, hostname, and SSH keys before you even plug it in, and the Pi is ready to use the moment it powers on.

# Once booted, update like any Debian system
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

# Install anything from the Debian universe
sudo apt install nginx python3-pip git vim

That's it. It's Linux. Everything works.

The GPIO Pins: Where It Gets Interesting

Every other computer hides its hardware behind layers of abstraction. The Raspberry Pi puts 40 pins right on the board and invites you to connect things to them.

GPIO (General Purpose Input/Output) pins can be controlled from code — set one HIGH and an LED lights up, read one and you know if a button is pressed. Beyond plain GPIO, the same 40-pin header exposes I2C, SPI, UART, and PWM interfaces, which means you can connect sensors, displays, motor controllers, relay boards, and thousands of off-the-shelf modules.

from gpiozero import LED
from time import sleep

led = LED(18)

while True:
    led.on()
    sleep(1)
    led.off()
    sleep(1)

That's a blinking LED in 8 lines of Python. Scale that up and you have home automation, weather stations, CNC controllers, and agricultural monitoring systems — all of which exist and run on Pis in the real world.

Raspberry Pi

What People Actually Build With These Things

The Pi's combination of real Linux, real networking, and hardware pins makes it useful across an almost absurd range of applications:

Network Tools

Media

Retro Gaming

Home Automation

Servers

Industrial and Scientific

The Camera Module

A dedicated Camera Module connector (CSI port) on every Pi lets you attach a high-quality camera board directly — no USB lag, full frame rate, hardware-accelerated encoding. The current Camera Module 3 shoots 12MP stills and 4K video.

This has spawned an entire ecosystem: wildlife cameras, time-lapse rigs, license plate readers, computer vision projects using TensorFlow Lite, and the HQ Camera that serious photographers use for astrophotography on a robotics mount.

The Community

Twelve years in, the Raspberry Pi community is enormous and relentlessly helpful. The official forums, r/raspberry_pi, and hundreds of project-specific communities mean that virtually any problem you'll hit has been solved and documented. Adafruit and SparkFun sell hardware specifically designed for the Pi. MagPi magazine publishes monthly project guides. There are books, YouTube channels, and university courses built entirely around it.

The Foundation also produces a line of official accessories — cases, touchscreens, HATs (Hardware Attached on Top boards), and the Raspberry Pi Debug Probe — all priced to match the Pi's philosophy of keeping costs low.

Should You Get One?

If you've ever wanted to:

...then yes, immediately.

The barrier is low. An official Raspberry Pi Starter Kit (Pi + case + microSD + power supply) runs $70–90. The Raspberry Pi Imager is free and takes five minutes to set up. The documentation at raspberrypi.com/documentation is some of the best in the hardware world.

The Pi is also one of the few computing platforms that rewards curiosity. Break something? Flash the SD card and start over. Wonder what happens if you connect that sensor? Connect it and find out. The worst-case scenario is a $15 replacement microSD. The best-case scenario is you build something genuinely useful that runs in your house for years.

Quick Reference

Task Command / Tool
Write OS to SD card Raspberry Pi Imager
Update the system sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade
Enable SSH sudo raspi-config → Interface Options
Check CPU temperature vcgencmd measure_temp
Check throttling vcgencmd get_throttled
GPIO from Python gpiozero library (works on all Pi models)
GPIO from terminal raspi-gpio set 18 op dh
Find Pi on network ping raspberrypi.local
Official documentation raspberrypi.com/documentation

The Bottom Line

The Raspberry Pi started as an attempt to get kids interested in computers. It accidentally became the go-to platform for network engineers, home automation enthusiasts, retro gamers, astronomers, farmers, artists, and anyone who ever wanted a cheap Linux box that runs 24/7 without complaint.

Raspbian — now Raspberry Pi OS — is mature, well-documented Debian Linux. Everything you know about Linux works. Everything the Pi adds on top of that is useful. And at $35–80 for a complete computer, the only real question is what you're going to build first.