Aphra Upton, aged nearly two, rubs gingerbread-sticky hands over her father’s face and tries to clamber up his shirtfront. She is eloquently underscoring the point Eben Upton has just been making: designing something sturdy enough for kids is difficult and if you can get that right, it will pretty much work anywhere else.
“If you can make something robust enough to survive that,” he says, nodding at his daughter and clutching the hem of her dress to stop her pitching over the edge of the banquette seat, “it is probably robust enough to survive running in your factory.”
This is the story of the Raspberry Pi in a nutshell. The tiny, cheap, pared-back computer was invented by Upton in 2008 to inspire children to learn coding. Upton, then an academic at Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, was originally expecting to sell somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 units. Instead it has sold over 25m units, not just to children and computer hobbyists but increasingly to industrial and business users, becoming the best-selling British computer of all time. Some 3m units last year went to business users such as factories and hotel chains....