The sweet Raspberry taste of success masks a missed opportunity

Opinion The Raspberry Pi is a moral hazard because it's been far too good to us. For the past 12 years, the Pi series has bombarded the world with extremely affordable, extremely useful computers designed purely to promote education, innovation and the democratization of digital skills.

The full spectrum of geekery, from precocious prepubescents to CEOs of specialist technical companies, has grown to expect an endless stream of well-engineered hardware backed by a mainstream software stack and a thriving ecosystem. From the $4 Pi Pico microcontroller to the new $90 Pi 500 complete desktop computer, Raspberry is what an Apple run by Steve Woz instead of Jobs might have looked like. 

As a result, we Pi fans have been spoiled rotten. We don't see the profound challenge of mastering cheap, powerful and manufacturable at scale - the impossible triangle that sank most of the UK's first generation of computer makers. We complain when consumers can't get boards during supply chain meltdown because of the insane success of the Pi in commercial use. 

Success here not only keeps an industry sector alive, it guides the continued relevance of Pi evolution in ways that benefit us all. We look at the Pi 500 and don't see a ridiculously functional, very low budget educational and home computer built around open source, but something unexpandable with missing options and internal tinkering discouraged. Try finding anything near as good. How dare we?

These may be the misperceptions of an ungrateful, entitled nerdery too used to a good thing, but there's a deeper truth at work. In part, this is an unavoidable consequence of the Raspberry Pi idea growing from a single, focused product of "a BBC Micro for today" to a revival of proficiency in low-level software and hardware skills amongst a very diverse enterprise that serves many different audiences. In part, this is because, despite the ethos of early microcomputing still fuelling the Raspberry Pi-maker's thinking, it isn't possible to recapitulate the raw excitement that happened back then. 

Pi-meister Eben Upton has never hidden being a huge fan of the Amiga 500, which parachuted sound synthesis, multimedia graphics and multitasking into markets that were used to machines which spent most of their time pretending to be glass teletypes with crude bitmap graphics stapled on. The chance to make a Pi 500 in tribute was, he hinted, irresistible. It could never be that tribute, though; the Pi 400 was the bold move into a market that nobody knew could be reanimated by Pi magic. The Pi 500's existence is a strategic success where strategy is the hardest trick to pull off. It is deserving of more attention offworld of Planet Pi than it will get. But what it is not, is exciting. Somehow, we expected excitement. 

In a way, unexciting is good. The Raspberry Pi has already outlived Commodore Amiga, which lasted less than nine years before being sold off, crushed under the wheels of Wintel. Raspberry Pi is its own Wintel; it may not define single-board computing but you need a top-notch reason to go elsewhere.

That first generation of mass market microcomputers created a generation that is confident in its own expertise. It knew what computing meant from the ground up. The Raspberry Pi concept has been beyond excellent at opening up hardware for anyone to do anything with. Moreover, it can do so with the most modern of software - that hardware is coupled to a full Linux environment. 

That is essential to its relevance, utility and long life. What it is no better at than anything else, is enabling people to iteratively and effectively learn how to be a modern programmer. In their day, the first generation did that. That got lost in the rainforests of complexity overgrowing in ever more fertile silicon soil. Planet Pi retains all this daunting complexity, even if it does encourage us to descend from the canopy and poke around among the roots. 

Going back to basics in a modern way was always part of the original brief - the Pi was a panning nod to Python, which was to take the place of BASIC as the switch-on-and-go instant gratifier. That concept never really came off. What is needed is the system software equivalent of Lego – where the grimy details of interfacing software components are as hidden as the screen memory mapping arithmetic underneath PLOT X,Y in BASIC. 

It is hard to imagine the nature of abstraction that's needed to untangle even a little, limited subset of the structural complexity that modern systems present, and it is absolutely no criticism of Planet Pi that it doesn't exist there. It is the ideal place to start, though, as known to home lab builders who want multiple truly independent machines to explore ideas with. Want a real eight machine cluster to practice your Kubernetes? Well then.  

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Encouraging naive users to go under the hood is always going to be a bad idea on systems with other jobs to do. Nobody wants to build Lego models on top of a running car engine, let alone ones that interface with the fuel injection, explosions and HT leads, even if that's the best way to learn about how internal combustion actually works. 

It will take a lot of very smart people doing things for the first time to Lego-ize modern system ideas. That's OK. It took a lot of very smart people to make the first generation of computers work, and there are a lot of very smart people as a result dedicated to the Raspberry. Time to start making the hard stuff as easy as Pi. ®