History Behind Raspberry Pi

In 2006, early concepts of the Raspberry Pi were based on the Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller. Its schematics and PCB layout are available for public download. Foundation trustee Eben Upton assembled a group of teachers, academics and computer enthusiasts to devise a computer to inspire children. The computer is inspired by Acorn's BBC Micro of 1981. The first ARM prototype version of the computer was mounted in a package the same size as a USB memory stick. It had a USB port on one end and a HDMI port on the other.
Pre-launch

In August 2011, fifty Alpha boards were manufactured. These boards were functionally identical to the planned model B, but were physically larger to accommodate debug headers. Demonstrations of the board showed it running the LXDE desktop on Debian, Quake 3 at 1080p, and Full HD MPEG-4 video over HDMI.

In October 2011, a version of RISC OS 5 was demonstrated in public, and following a year of development the port was released for general consumption in November 2012.
Certificate of authenticity for an auctioned board

In December 2011, twenty-five model B Beta boards were assembled and tested[34] from one hundred unpopulated PCBs. The component layout of the Beta boards was the same as on production boards. A single error was discovered in the board design where some pins on the CPU were not held high; it was fixed for the first production run.The Beta boards were demonstrated booting Linux, playing a 1080p movie trailer and the Rightware Samurai OpenGL ES benchmark.

During the first week of 2012, the first 10 boards were put up for auction on eBay. One was bought anonymously and donated to the museum at The Centre for Computing History in Suffolk, England. The ten boards (with a total retail price of £220) together raised over £16,000, with the last to be auctioned, serial number No. 01, raising £3,500.  In advance of the anticipated launch at the end of February 2012, the Foundation's servers struggled to cope with the load placed by watchers repeatedly refreshing their browsers.
Launch

The first batch of 10,000 boards was manufactured in Taiwan and China,  rather than in the UK. This is in part because import duty is payable on individual components but not on finished products. Chinese manufacturers also quoted a lead time of four weeks, compared to twelve weeks in the UK.

Shipping delays for the first batch were announced in March 2012, as the result of installation of an incorrect Ethernet port. But the Foundation expects that manufacturing quantities of future batches can be increased with little difficulty if required.

    "We have ensured we can get them [the Ethernet connectors with magnetics] in large numbers and Premier Farnell and RS Components [the two distributors] have been fantastic at helping to source components," Upton said.

Initial sales commenced 29 February 2012 at 06:00 UTC;. At the same time, it was announced that the Model A, originally to have had 128 MB of RAM, was to be upgraded to 256 MB before release.The Foundation's website also announced "Six years after the project's inception, we're nearly at the end of our first run of development – although it's just the beginning of the Raspberry Pi story." The web-shops of the two licensed manufacturers selling Raspberry Pi's within the United Kingdom, Premier Farnell and RS Components, had their websites stalled by heavy web traffic immediately after the launch.[52] At one point the webmaster pleaded, "Guys – can you please stop hitting F5 on our website quite so often? You're bringing the server to its knees."[53] Although as yet unconfirmed, reports suggest that there are over two million expressions of interest or pre-orders.[54] The official Raspberry Pi Twitter account reported that Premier Farnell sold out within a few minutes of the initial launch, while RS Components took over 100,000 pre orders on day one.As of September 2012, about 500,000 boards have been sold.
Manufacturers were reported in March 2012 to be taking a "healthy number" of pre-orders.

Source : wikipedia

Super Mini Computer Raspbery Pi

Do you know raspberry??

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of promoting the teaching of basic computer science in schools.

RASPBERRY PI PICTURE

The Raspberry Pi is manufactured through licensed manufacturing deals with Element 14/Premier Farnell and RS Components. Both of these companies sell the Raspberry Pi online.

The Raspberry Pi has a Broadcom BCM2835 system on a chip (SoC), which includes an ARM1176JZF-S 700 MHz processor (The firmware includes a number of "Turbo" modes so that the user can attempt overclocking, up to 1 GHz, without affecting the warranty),[4] VideoCore IV GPU,[12] and was originally shipped with 256 megabytes of RAM, later upgraded to 512MB. It does not include a built-in hard disk or solid-state drive, but uses an SD card for booting and long-term storage.The Foundation's goal is to offer two versions, priced at US$25 and US$35. The Foundation started accepting orders for the higher priced model B on 29 February 2012,[15] and the lower cost model A on 4 February 2013.[16

The Foundation provides Debian and Arch Linux ARM distributions for download. Also planned are tools for supporting Python as the main programming language,[18][19] with support for BBC BASIC,(via the RISC OS image or the "Brandy Basic" clone for Linux), C, and Perl.

On 17 December 2012 the Raspberry Pi Foundation, in collaboration with IndieCity and Velocix, opened the "Pi Store", as a "one-stop shop for all your Raspberry Pi (software) needs". Using an application included in Raspbian, users can browse through several categories and download what they want. Software can also be uploaded for moderation and release.

source : wikipedia