Raspberry Pi designer Eben Upton, pictured at the Sony factory in Pencoed. Image: Nick Heath

Eben Upton’s overwhelming emotion at having co-created a $35 Linux computer that sold in the hundreds of thousands last year is surprise.

The 34-year-old chip architect is genuinely taken aback that demand for the Raspberry Pi proved to be orders of magnitude larger than a small pool of aspiring UK computer engineers.

“We honestly did think we would sell about 1,000, maybe 10,000 in our wildest dreams. We thought we would make a small number and give them out to people who might want to come and read computer science at Cambridge,” he told ZDNet.

The first inkling of the fervour the credit card-sized board would create came in May 2011, when the first public outing of the Pi in a BBC video generated some 600,000 views on YouTube.

Upton and his colleagues revised their initial run of boards up to 10,000, thinking that would be more than enough to meet demand.

Eben Upton 曾經以為一萬片樹莓派就是最大夢想，然而在三年後的今天，樹莓派 2B 兩星期銷售五十萬片，或許說這個世界期待被改變已經太久了吧！還是講『數大就是美』，單純的教育理念之美撼動商業主導之世界，經濟掛帥的國度，帶給學習者不同的選擇？工程的本質是什麼？工程師是否有天命？？也許第一流的人物就像

《【Sonic π】電路學之補充《四》無窮小算術‧上》一文裡的

阿基米德︰

經由研究古代『再生羊皮書』上的文字，科學家發現了失傳的阿基米德手稿，並加以解讀。在殘卷《方法》命題十四中，阿基米德提出了『無窮大』的概念，是現代『集合論』的基礎。在殘卷《胃痛》中，現代科學家發現，阿基米德經由一種希臘圖形遊戲 ── 胃痛 ──，研究以十四片碎片組成正方形的所有拼法，成為『組合學』最早的開端。