I work here at Google.

I'm very excited about the Raspberry Pi and happy to

introduce it here.

So 30 years ago, I learned Apple Logo and we had the

Apple Turtle, which is a little bowl-like thing.

And you tell it forward 10 and it moves 10 units forward, and

you tell it right 90 and it goes right

90, and other things.

And that was an amazing experience for me as a kid,

because it was a robot.

You could see the motors in there and little servos, the

serial ports and all the fun things.

And that got me really excited about computers, and that was

kind of what started me on, well, the

path that I'm on now.

So I'm really excited about the Raspberry Pi and the

potential it has for education in my own kids and other kids,

and getting people to understand what is involved in

a computer.

I mean, you look at a tablet or a phone, it's pretty much

literally a black box.

So I'm very excited to welcome Rob Bishop.

He's one of the early engineers in the Raspberry Pi

Foundation.

And he's going to tell us all about the Pi and the

foundation.

ROB BISHOP: Hey, guys.

So yeah, I'm Rob Bishop.

I'm here over from the UK touring a number of computer

science departments and hackspaces, talking about the

Raspberry Pi, talking to the community, seeing what

projects are being made, making links to see what we

can do for education.

So as was introduced, I'm one of the earlier engineers for

the foundation.

I'm one of very few developers we have

supporting this project.

Talking about the foundation.

We're a registered charity back in the UK.

We're a not-for-profit organization.

And at the moment we have no paid employees.

So when you think, we currently have half a million

of these devices in the world and there's maybe five or six

engineers supporting this in their own time, that's

probably why we're probably a bit slow on responding to some

issues on GitHub, right?

So what is the Raspberry Pi?

For people who've just turned up and know nothing about it,

essentially it's a credit card computer.

It's a Unix box with GPIO and an HDMI out which is $35.

I mean, that alone kind of sells it to a lot of the

hacker crowd, sells it to a lot of people in here.

The point is that cool robot thing you've always wanted to

make but you couldn't quite justify spending hundreds of

dollars on the brain to go and do it, now you can go do your

Unix development, now you can make physical

computing for $35.

And before Christmas, we're going to release the Model A--

this is the Model B, named after the

tradition of the BBC Micro--

which is going to be the same board but without the

networking chip and connector, and that's going to be $25.

So why do we produce this?

How come a bunch of engineers are giving up their evenings

and weekends to come and make this thing?

And why am I here talking to you about it today?

So it all started when the founder, Eben Upton, was

working as the director of undergraduate studies for

computer science at Saint John's College in Cambridge.

And while he was there, he realized that the quality of

the candidates he had apply for computer science was

dropping on a year-by-year basis.

And he's getting fewer candidates with lower skills.

And he was really concerned as to why this was.

And he realized that it's bad for our industry, it's bad for

our economy.

It's bad for geeks like me to have toys to play with if we

don't have people who are talented enough

to go and make them.

And it's something that resonated with him.

Now he's working at Broadcom.

He finds it very hard to hire good engineers.

And the problem is because we're sort of suffering from

people not growing up with the low-level skills

that he grew up with.

So why doesn't my generation have those skills?

Well, if you think about it, my generation grew up with two

kinds of computing device.

We grew up with a games console and we grew up with a

shared Windows home PC.

Now starting off with the games console-- that's a

phenomenally advanced bit of kit, right?

The silicon in there, in terms of FLOPS performance, is

better than the 1990s' Cray supercomputer.

You think, like, DARPA and NSA could build

supercomputers out of PS3s.

The problem is, is that they're completely closed.

And as an educational device, they're a complete dead-end.

Whereas Eben, if he wanted to go play a game, would go to

the newsagent's, buy a computing magazine, flick

through the pages till he found a game he liked, go home

and actually type in the source code that was on the

page before he could play it.

We just get downloadable content for "Call of Duty" and

go play with phenomenally advanced graphics engines, but

we can't even see the source code for that even

if we wanted to.

You don't sell a games console based on what silicon's in it.

You don't sell it based on what FLOPS performance is.

You sell it based on the games titles and the

kind of closed packaging.

And the problem is, as I say, that's a dead-end platform for

learning how to use.

So what's the other kind of device we grew up with?

I mean, when we grew up back in the UK, we did these things

ICT lessons, Information Communication Technologies.

It's kind of rare to find a school that teaches computing.

Certainly I went to a good private school back in the UK.

But there weren't any computing lessons available,

even if you wanted them.

And these lessons were essentially sales pitches for

Microsoft Office products, right?

I mean, does my generation really need to be taught at 16

how to go and use Microsoft Word?

It kind of doesn't make any sense.

And the thing is, while it's great that we have this

proliferation of computing devices, while nearly every

home now has these Windows PCs, there's a barrier--

either an effort or a cost barrier-- to going and

developing on them.

If you want to go develop on your Windows PC, you have to

go and find the development tools.

You've got to go and have source Visual Studio and

either download it for free as a student or

go and pay for it.

You've got to go make the effort to go to be able to

develop on it.

And you've got to invest the time and the money

to go and do that.

Whereas alternatively, you could open up Chrome and go,

[INAUDIBLE].

Right?

And this is a problem.

In this instant gratification society that we grew up in,

when there's no barrier to content consumption and there

is a barrier to content creation, no wonder we're

having a sort of Lost Generation of people who

didn't bother becoming hackers because there was HD video

content that they could easily get to.

And what we realized is that, sort of taking a step back,

when I grew up, talking about hacking on PCs, I remember

taking apart my parents' computer, their Windows box,

and getting shouted at by my dad because he needed to check

his email and the motherboard's

on the floor, right?

It's no good having these machines and saying, let's

tinker, let's hack, let's make, if you need to then use

them to do your

word-processing for your homework.

And it's no good having these game consoles that are

incredibly advanced if when you do go and hack it and run

Linux on it, you get sued by Sony Corporation.

So what we realized was what we needed was another device.

We needed an additional device that removed the abstraction,

that removed the barriers, and that was just there as a toy

for tinkering.

We wanted something you could switch out your Xbox 360 with,

put in a low cost barrier, a low effort barrier, and it was

just there.

It was straight in with the development tools.

It was straight in to go and make things happen, to go and

build robots.

And we realized there was two keys to this.

The first was price.

It needed to be cheap enough that even parents who didn't

understand computing, they were happy to buy it just

because it was cheap enough.

And then we needed to make sure the kids had ownership.

We needed to make sure that this was a

device just for tinkering.

It was their device.

They didn't have to worry about whether or

not they broke it.

They didn't have to worry about whether or not it was

still in a usable state to go and do their homework on it.

This was a machine for play.

It was a machine for hacking.

And so Eben always had this dream, but it was only when he

was working at Broadcom developing processes for

mobile phones that he realized that actually, we have the

technology at the price point we needed to

go and fulfill this.

And so essentially what happened is we took the

development board that was being used for the Broadcom

applications process on this board and turned it into this,

turned it into the Raspberry Pi.

And that's essentially where this came from.

In many ways, this is a cell phone without the base band,

without the radio.

And the idea is that this has HDMI connections, it has

components.

You could hook this up to your CRT TV.

You can put it in place of your Xbox 360.

And all you need is an SD card out of your camera you might

have lying around, keyboard and mouse from an old PC you

might have junked, and a micro-USB charger you might

already have for your BlackBerry.

These are things that are just lying around.

So you just need this $35 investment to go and have a

toy to play with.

What's great about this device is it's accessible but not

necessarily easy to use.

The point is that rather than covering all the kernel

booting on some kind of nice graphic, we print out all the

steps on the kernel booting.

Because what we kind of hope is that

kids will ask questions.

You know, we think you learn by seeing.

You learn by asking questions.

You learn by being inspired, wanting to make things and

having to overcome obstacles in that goal.

When you boot this up it goes into command prompt.

If you want a GUI, you have to launch a GUI.

And we don't have a nice sugarcoated button saying, you

know, Launch GUI.

You have to type in startx. x.

And then we get these 10-year-old kids going, well,

what does startx mean?

It's like, well, you're starting an X server.

And they're like, well, what's an X server?

You're like, well, actually, you know, this is how

operating systems really work.

The Start button isn't an integral part of your

operating system, contrary to popular belief.

And so the point is that it's all accessible, it's all

immediate, and it's a great platform for developing.

So where are we going as a foundation?

So I talk about the fact that we're very interested in