Gray foggy, damp and weirdly warm in Chicago this morning. Christmas coming. The rushing of lesser angels stops cold for a stolen moment and you start missing past times and people you can see, text, email or call up on the phone. Which makes me remember Raspberry Pi.
The idea behind Raspberry Pi is to put the power of computing into everyone’s hands. Literally everyone. In the whole world. This is more like a movement than a foundation and business. Look at their web pages and you’ll see stories and plans like “putting a computer in every school in England.” A proposition which, you figure, would mean that the computers would have to go for around $35 apiece. And they do.
The Raspberry Pi call to action is “teach, learn, make.” There is an old management development cliché that goes “think outside the box.” At Raspberry Pi the more relevant directive would be “Forget the box.”
What I know about Raspberry Pi, and I know relatively little, came from my Dad. And I have no doubt that he knew a lot. With a world class engineering analytical mind recognized at the highest levels of Wall Street, and a heart the size of Lake Michigan, my Dad probably knew as much about the ins and outs of Raspberry Pi than the folks who founded and ran the company. And in the talks with my Dad, just before he passed, he would share his excitement about this computing for everyone idea. Shared it so well that I still get excited thinking about it even though its been years since we talked.
Years since we talked. But it was only last week that I was taking the elevator up to the floor I work on – where a whole lot of engineering goes on. Looking at the advertisement, news and sports scores on the video screen above the elevator buttons. And it flashed for just one tiny golden moment. An ad for Raspberry Pi!
As if my Dad and I were still talking.
And he was saying, “Merry Christmas to All”
