IEEE Spectrum - North American - March 2015 - 41

Eben upton
ieee member

36
aGe

Founder, Raspberry Pi
Foundation
occupation

Cambridge, England
location

Dismayed at students' poor coding skills, he created
a capable yet ultracheap computer to get them hooked
on programming.
hero moment

The Raspberry
Pi-oneer
Eben Upton just wanted to help some kids learn
to code. Four million units later, his $35 computer
has sparked a revolution

In 1988, 10-year-old Eben Upton bought his
first computer: a beat-up, secondhand BBC
Micro. This little machine was ubiquitous in
British schools at the time, not least because
it ran a simple programming language called
BASIC, which Upton quickly mastered and
used to create various games.
Fast-forward almost two decades. Upton
had just been appointed director of studies in computer science at the University
of Cambridge's St John's College. And he
noticed a big problem: Applications to
study computer science at the university
were declining, and few incoming students had any programming skills at all.
Like many of his contemporaries,
Upton, who holds a Ph.D. in computer
science from Cambridge and had already
founded two software companies, owed
his career to a childhood spent twiddling
bits. "Kids today don't have that experience," he says. Instead of diving in deep
with programmable computers like the
BBC Micro, most of today's youth only
scratch the surface of computing, despite
all the hours they log with their phones,
game consoles, and Web browsers.

Upton's solution was to create a miniature computer, barely bigger than a
credit card, which cost just US $35. It
was essentially a circuit board fitted
with a smartphone processor chip,
256 megabytes of RAM (since boosted to
1 gigabyte), and some attractive options
for connectivity: USB ports, a slot for a
memory card, general-purpose inputoutput pins to link it with other devices,
an Ethernet port, and HDMI and analog
ports to connect it to a television or computer monitor. "It's trying to be cheap,
it's trying to be robust, and it's trying to
be fun," says Upton.
When the Raspberry Pi launched on
29 February 2012, Upton figured that
getting a thousand units into the hands
of the right kids would help to end the
drought of qualified candidates applying

to study computer science at Cambridge.
Instead, demand exploded: To date,
more than 4.5 million units have sold,
including the stripped-down Model A+,
which boasts a $20 price tag, and the
more powerful Pi2, which debuted last
month. The Pi's low cost means that
pretty much everyone can own one.
"Overly sleek things can be bad for
education," says Alan Mycroft, a professor of computing at the University of
Cambridge's Computer Laboratory and
a trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This charity, which Upton set up,
takes the profit from Pi sales and plows
it into education initiatives and other
outreach activities.
Mycroft credits Upton for helping
inspire a new generation of student
coders, hackers, and hobbyists. "He's
brought inspiration, leadership, and
persistence to it-Eben just won't let go."
growing up in the small town of Ilkley
in northern England, Upton didn't have
a techy household-his father was a professor of English, his mother an English
teacher. In part because of his own back-

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