The Raspberry Pi is 10/One decade, 46 million units: Happy birthday, Raspberry Pi

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"We were already aware that it was going to be bigger than expected," says Upton. "We had this idea of doing 1,000 or 10,000 or something... we had a couple of thousand units on order with our first contract manufacturer in China.
"Around Christmas time, when we got the first beta boards back, we put an operating system [based on Debian] online… and it had 50,000 downloads. And all you could do was run it in QEMU (there was a QEMU config you could build that was similar enough to a Raspberry Pi).
"50,000 people downloaded this really primitive operating system for a machine that you couldn't buy!" he exclaims.
And that was when realisation dawned that demand for the hardware would be far higher than a run of 1,000, 10,000 or even 100,000 units.
Upton tells us that approximately 46 million units have been manufactured to date. Although getting hold of one in 2022 is a bit of challenge. More on that later.
While the final iterations of those first Raspberry Pi computers, the Pi 1 Model A+ and B+, can still be purchased, for Upton it was the Raspberry Pi 2 that marked the biggest step change, despite the relatively short period before the 3 arrived in 2016.
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The original Raspberry Pi PC turns 10 years old today
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