The tech community went wild last week as members tried to get their hands on what they believe could be a revolution in computing, the Raspberry Pi, created to inspire a new generation of potential programmers. Metro talks to the group behind it.
It had all the excitement and anticipation associated with the launch of some rather more established products named after a piece of fruit.
But instead of the technology world grasping for a bite of an Apple, it spent last week desperately trying to grab a little piece of Raspberry Pi.
The first batch of 10,000 units of the British single-board computer sold out almost immediately as two websites designated to meet demand struggled with the volume of interest.
Those in the know appear confident that the Raspberry Pi represents the future of computing programming but how will it fare among its principal target audience: children?
People behind the credit card-sized device are keen to see what computer experts will do with it but their main goal is to provide one for every child in British schools.
Like a compact version of a BBC Micro or a ZX Spectrum from the 1980s, the Raspberry Pi is designed to inspire the computer programmers of tomorrow.
Currently just a circuit board â transparent casing will be put on future batches â it costs just Â£22.
It provides two USB ports for a keyboard and mouse, an Ethernet port to connect to the internet, an HDMI port for high definition video, an SD memory card slot and a power port.
It is up to the user to then hook the Raspberry Pi up to a keyboard, mouse and screen â either a television or a computer monitor.
The Raspberry Pi (named after programming language Python) runs a version of the free operating system Linux, found in smartphones and web servers.
Linux will be installed on the SD card. The computer runs Scratch, a programming aid for children designed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The computer went on sale on Wednesday last week, with tens of thousands of people scrambling to get their hands on one.
Dr Eben Upton, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation â the Cambridge-based charity behind the device â told Metro it had been a âcompletely insaneâ day.
âItâs been successful beyond our wildest dreams and certainly beyond any kind of volume that we could have imagined,â he said.
âThe challenge now is getting them out to people.â
The 10,000 that were sold were pre-ordered â they are now being manufactured in Taiwan and China to meet customer demand, with the first units expected to arrive in the next few weeks.
More batches will go on sale in about a month and those seeking a device can register their interest.
âLarge commercial organisations obviously can pre-build large numbers of devices before they launch anything,â said Dr Upton. âAs a foundation we couldnât possibly match the need to build tens and tens of thousands of these to fulfil day one demand.â
He is clear about where that demand has come from.
âWhat we expect is that people doing the buying at the moment are geeks, people who already know about computers, people who are quite technically sophisticated.
âWeâre going to be relying on these people to do some of the software development, to make the platform more attractive so that when we do go into schools itâs a more polished product.â
The foundation wants to get the device to be ready to go into schools this September, although this will mean adding casing and packing software together. The group is looking at two methods â going through education authorities and putting them directly in individual childrenâs hands.
âPeople buying individual ones is actually very appealing in a lot of ways because people like me, who grew up in the 1980s with home computers, we didnât do most of our hacking at school, we did most of our hacking at home.â
A lot of the Rapberry Piâs popularity is built around nostalgia but do those behind it worry it might not interest todayâs children?
âWhen we were in front of a class, we had to get two or three of them off the machine with a crowbar at the end! They were being ordered to go to their next lesson by the teacher,â said Dr Upton.
He said programming was âenormously importantâ for the British economy, leading to potential jobs in computing, engineering and the financial services industry. Import duty tax regulations means the first batches of the Pi will be made in Taiwan and China. For now, manufacturing them here isnât affordable.
âWe found out that we could just about make them at zero profit in the UK if we were lucky, whereas theyâre reasonably profitable if you manufacture them in the Far East,â Dr Upton said.
Games consoles had taken the power of computer programming away from the masses, he claimed.
âI think thereâs a lot of pent-up desire to get involved in this sort of thing. If we tried to ram this down peopleâs throats and they didnât want it I donât think it would be anything as like as successful.
âIn a certain bit of the community thereâs a lot of nostalgia for the way that things were in the 1980s, where you had machines you could actually understand, machines that were cheap enough that you could afford to give them to your kid and not care whether your kid breaks it or not.â