Retro Tea Break | Eben Upton tells the Raspberry Pi Story
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- čas přidán 5. 09. 2024
- Eben Upton of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (www.raspberryp...) joins us today to tell us about the story of the Pi. From inception to launch and beyond. Grab a cuppa, it's time for a tea break.
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Neil - RMC
Pico boots into Basic64 (not on pi4 yet ;o) but in 2 seconds and 3.8mb...
www.riscosopen.org/content/downloads/raspberry-pi
I completely missed this, it was on my 50th Birthday! [ Beeb then Amiga, then UNIX Software Engineer ]
Haven't watched yet, but my first though was: "Why is he interviewing Jason Statham?" 😜
That was my first thought as well, it's Jason Statham! 😁
Well .... have you ever seen them both in the same place at the same time? ......
@@andypyne Eben Upton and Jason Statham? I haven't seen them even separately...
But what that has to do with anything? They have similar looks, partly and when one takes a quick peek at a small thumbnail on phone screen...
@@miikasuominen3845 Have you ever seen Clark Kent and Superman at the same time? .......
@@UberAlphaSirus No, not them either 🤣 PS. And I didn't get the reference of what Andy Pyne meant from he's post, but I got it from your comment 😉
Not watched it yet, but he was great in Snatch!
Bugger he spoke voice is all wrong
Hes a propa East-end geezer
Wasn't he in Lock Stock as well?
Brilliant episode - deep and interesting story about an intriguing machine. 10/10!
If this guy doesn’t get a knighthood they should stop awarding them.
I was just thinking the same thing. He totally deserves it.
What a legend. Thanks for making a device that millions of us love using every day!
I had no idea that the Pi originated in the UK. Outstanding.
I've followed the Arm Chip development from the early days and the Rasp Pi as well. I was great to hear Edbon's take of the story, thank you
Built my business thanks to this man and his team. Truly world changing technology.
If you don't mind me asking, what kind of work is your business?
@@nytrex2001 manufacturing IoT
@@miketaylor3559 wow. That's pretty cutting edge. Good on you. I hope you and your business do very well.
Such a pleasure to listen not only to the interviewee, but also the interviewer, subscribed. Thank you Neil!
Wow great, you are lucky to talk to Mr. Upton. The Pi open so many people to world of making and computers. I like so much tinkering with the pi.
58:04 “SATA’s still good towards spinning rust.”
That hilarious, and genius.
Great interview.
I went ZX81, Spectrum, QL, Amiga. Never owned an ST. When my friend said he was buying an ST, I said look at the graphics and sound specs. Six months later he said he should have bought an Amiga.
I always mocked my mate with a QL .... but I had a Jupiter Ace so was in NO position to cast aspersions!
Jason Statham is a tech geek?!
I preferred him in The Meg.
LOL, I was thinking the same thing!
same thought here LOL
He has the wrong accent, but at a glance he might might fool someone.
GREAT interview! THANK YOU for making the Raspberry Pi! I am a wannaby roboticist but I started with a TRS-80 and BASIC back in 1977. I love the Pi! LOVE LOVE! And not only does it solve a problem of how to control my projects, but the Pi4 (or perhaps what comes next) will be my everyday home computer when my current Phenom II desktop gets put out to pasture. All good wishes!
This interview deserves so much more thumbs up. Thank you.
I got super lucky getting a zero. Just as I got on the train for my commute, I got the email about the zero on the mag. At my destination I dived into the nearest WHSmith and got the last one :)
45:25 "It was the bald one!" hahaha. In all seriousness though, great interview from both the interviewee and the interviewer. Well done Neil!
Thanks Richard
Superb stuff. And I watched it on this Raspberry Pi 4 4GB. :)
Excellent interview! Like a lot of others here I jumped on the original Raspberry Pi, eventually getting the Pibow by Pimoroni to go with it. I have to be honest, it fell victim to the weak SD card holder, where the plastic gave way and the card no longer stayed in place. I managed to fix it by sandwiching a piece of thin cardboard between the case and the SD card itself, and it served me for many years in many different roles, particularly bolstering my experience in Linux.
I've since bought the second and third iterations and contemplating the fourth. These are almost a staple for me now and have proven to be extremely versatile! I learned from you in previous videos that the ARM processor has a great history in education and the UK microcomputer era, and to me it feels like a genuine modern continuation of that whole paradigm. Here's to many further years of success!
We need this kind of energy and enthusiasm in UK computing.
I know people are quite entitled to their own opinions, but why would one person dislike this video. It's a brilliant and engaging interview.
Those are Australian thumbs up!
@@RMCRetro It's a win win all round 😁
I suspect due to its length. Sad as that is as this is very interesting!!!
RetroManCave
BRILLIANT
For the retro-computing scene this channel does some of THE best interviews of luminaries.
I think Eben Upton may be missing the point about FPGAs vis-a-vis Raspberry Pi. There is a revolution of education and democratization waiting to happen with FPGAs and the field of EE and chip design. What the Raspberry Pi set out to do for computer science education (and also spurred an Arduino-like Maker phenomena) is sorely needed with FPGAs. Eben thinks that adding an FPGA to a Pi would serve too narrow of a community interest, but that is precisely the problem. That community is relatively small for a reason - but it could be much vaster. The universal complaint about FPGAs - despite that there's a great deal of interest in them - is that they're very steep to get into, to learn, and master. That is where there needs to be a Raspberry Pi kind of revolution - make an FPGA for the masses that is low cost but far easier to get involved with the learning and the mastering of digital circuit designed apparatuses. Do for EE what Pi did for CS.
I totally agree with you, but that doesn't negate his point - Arduino and Pi don't solve the same problem IMHO! I think an affordable and fun FPGA platform is closer to an Arduino than to a Pi, in the sense that you'd expect to do low-level programming on an Arduino, and less so on a Pi. Also FWIW, I think this platform already exists (look up FPGA boards under $35, they are a thing!), and combined with MyHDL it could be made into a good entry-level FPGA dev platform!
Liked by 193 people, disliked by the 1 PCW owner. 😃 Really interesting interview Neil, Eben’s responses are insightful and inspirational.
What is pcw?
Eben is such a nice guy
I've met Eben many times, top guy. He bought my bosses old house and has made a beautiful job of renovating it. Top taste I must say. Briliant interview :)
That was a fantastic interview, thanks a lot to both of you! Neil, I was surprised you can't pronounce Braben properly :-) you may not have seen it but on the very first tea break my suggestion was in fact to interview him! Frontier: ELITE II was a fantastic game and I'd love to know more about David :-) he seems to have made many impossible things happen for this game, accurate physics, infinite universe etc (through a fixed seed and a PRNG, much like you'd do for procedural games today with a dynamic seed)!
The Transporter invented the Pie...great stuff
I remember it from the outset, when they were thinking it would be a small labor of love and were struggling to get Broadcom to ever talk to them...
I love to hear stories like that. That's what you get for underestimating the hobby projects. Sometimes they just BLOW.. UP... and become one of your bigger customers. :-D
Great interview, thanks
Wow. I definitely look forward to watching this one. Fantastic!
Fascinating episode! Many thanks guys.
I discovered Raspberry pi 2b because my job was selling them at the time when I started to work there. It was a store selling/repairing PCs. So I asked what it was and googled a bit and the same day I got one and told my boss to take it from my salary which he was totally okey with I mean it just meant I would be a few bucks shorter at pay day but it was worth it.
And I loved it ever sense then.
Been using pi 4 as my main desktop for months. It really is a great system. I would recommend moving the root directory to an ssd on the usb 3
The RPi 4 is a game changer. I run a 4 gig desktop unit and a 2 gig network service unit. Recently I deployed the first RPi4 systems for commercial projects. The 2gig version is the sweet spot for me.
Diggnuts rarely go over 2gb men uses. Mainly happens with the browser and lots of open tabs inc CZcams
@@munocat For browsing and working on the same RPi, 4gb is a must for me.
My preference for the 2gb model in most applications is headroom, more options and a bit of future proving.
I like to use a ram drive for heavy I/O applications to spare the SD card for instance. Various caches are another thing.
It's a lot more options for just a tenner.
Yay! An honest case on Chinese manufacturers! I've had nothing but positive experiances myself too.
Thanks for this amazing interview.
being a pi owner I enjoyed this so much.
What a brilliant interview. Well done mate.
Looking forward to listening to this
I have a Pi3b+ and Pi4 but I didn't really know much about the history of the product, so thanks for the interview it was very interesting.
You're welcome, thanks for listening
"Jumped up typewriter" made me smile.... are there REALLY PCW fanboys?!?!
Enjoyed the interview, thanks.
Jason Statham - is there no end to his mad skills?
Reminds me of an old boss in the RAF "design simply then simplify"
Great episode, thanks! :D
Very interesting interview, he has made 2 sales now. It can go next to my OG pi in its little pibow case.
Very informative
Amazing... the truly universal language of Basic 😁
what kept me out of studying computer science at university was gatekeepery bulls hit, so i skipped the university part and taught myself.
Jumped up what type writer, I had one of them LOL
chikitychikitychikity PING
Would love to hear a post-pandemic update to this conversation, please!
I'm watching this on my Ras-Pi 4 which is a entertainment computer on my main 55 in HDTV.
My Raspberry Pi 4 is also being my home theatre PC which I too watched this on.
I’m tempted to get one as my work PC, as my 9-year old iMac (running Linux, of course) doesn’t have usb-3, and is getting a bit long in the tooth.
47:00 Add an RTC! There are a lot of people that would benefit of a realtime clock powered by something like a CR2032, mostly for people without constant internet connection
Waste of time in my opinion with internet connected devices you can just use NTP or a local NTP server in your environment. How many people use a PI with no internet access (not many users I suspect)?
I’m sure someone makes a hat for it. I understand someone not wanting to be internet-connected 24/7.
The clever thing about the Pi is that it tries to keep its own rudimentary sense of time, so that it looks at the time and date at the last poweroff and sets it based on that.
In addition, you could always create a startup script that prompted for the time before any other services run.
Awrsome video as always neil
Did I heard that right? A new Compute Module may come later this year?
My BBC Micro had to be hit on the top to unfreeze the cursor when switched on, I got mine in 83/84, my Dad was a teacher, so he could bring software etc & hardware home at the weekend, like disc drives and the proper CUB monitor, had a lot od fun with it
This is really cool, thanks for doing this
Listened to this episode on podcast. A great interview and very interesting. I've used pi for a number of things from Kodi boxes with pi1 and pi2 models, which eventually I dropped.
As well as that I've used one for controlling a model railway with a hat that converts the signal needed to operate the DCC standard, works well, though on the pi2 jmri was somewhat slow but usable. I intend to upgrade to a pi4 at some point which should be much faster for it. Much easier than taking a laptop around when the pi can be fitted on the layout itself.
I really enjoyed this.
blimey, I saw the thumbnail and thought this was a Rasp Pi announcement, then looked closer and was like omg is that Neil??? no way! *grabs cuppa and settles in*
Really interesting what eben says about the decline in computer science.. When I was in sixth-form in 89/90 I wanted to do computer programming, but there were no courses available in my area. A-Level Computing was called 'Information Technology', which was exactly that - spreadsheets, databases and word processing - organising information. There were no game designer courses/programming courses.
bbc - amiga
speccy - st
sure it wasn't...
amstrad cpc - st
c64 - amiga
speccy - amiga
bbc - archimedes..
How the smeg did you get Eben Upton? (A personal hero of mine)! I couldn't get a hold of the handsome git for a Linux Format article! :P
I ordered RPI in the first few seconds, sadly it died in a lightning strike few years later.
Loved this interview! I was a day one Farnell Raspi1 purchaser too. I got the Pi, not the t-shirt 😄
Just what i needed! Cheers mate👍
Funnily enough I got my first ever raspbery pi last week, had alot of fun getting retro pi working on it, wanted to try out some of the arcade versions of the clasic 80's games like paperboy, looks great on my old cub 653 monitor.
Tim Barker I’ve been think about getting one to play around with, but I’m afraid of going down that rabbit hole! Sooner or later I will give in and get one and geek out!
@@Hiznogood I would have been very stuck with mine if it wasnt for alot of youtube tutorials 😆 also learnt that the raspberry pi 3 is a bit more compatible with things at the moment, than the new 4th version.
@@TimmyJoe633 Nonsense. Watch eta prime's video on installing retropie on a pi4. Get the 4gb pi4. Get a high quality Sandisk 32gb A1 micro sd card at a minimum. Get a case with a fan. Get a micro hdmi cable for your application. Micro hdmi adapters suck. Overclocked at 2100 and 750 for the gpu. Running retropie since Nov. Running N64 games, psp games. There is one setting in the Retropie menu you need to change that causes the screen to go blank in the middle of retroarch games took me a while to figure it out I believe it's under advanced options. Other than that my pi4 runs Retropie as glitch free as my 3b and 3b+ and handles the more graphics intense games better. They may figure out how to get things better optimized for even more games in the future, but it's great now. CZcams, Retropie and Raspberry pi forums can help you figure it all out. 8bitdo pro controller if you only get one. PS3 controllers work as well but can create conflicts with the bluetooth and other controllers.
Great video.
Pi's are so useful, really great little machines. I personally have 2 Pi 4s myself.
One with Batocera(I find it better than RetroPie) installed for playing my retro games to unclutter my room, now all my TV has around it is a PS4, Pi 4 and Wii U. Compare it to the mess I had before of about 10 systems with unmanageable cable jungle, and it is awesome. No games lost, either.
The second is a more serious application, with a headless Pi 4 with OpenMediaVault installed and an 8TB USB3 hard disk that contains backup images of every storage device in my house, including family. Where possible, in Windows for instance, I have made it an automated monthly background task. This gives me the peace of mind that if a storage device ever fails, I can simply rewrite the image to a new drive with minimal losses. The best part is that the entire thing, massive hard disk included, cost less than £150. Compare that to the price of a "real" NAS and yeah.
I think it sort of proves his point that they couldn't find a manufacturer in England.
Obviously, the viewer who chose "I disklike this" has no true appreciation of IT hardware history and the pioneers behind the progression. An excellent and professionally produced interview! Thank you
A micro that boots into Python, that sounds like heaven!
There are several smaller ARM-based systems which directly boot into CircuitPython or MicroPython at an instant and have their Python code on internal Flash mountable as USB mass storage devices. And without the pain of Debian's (and thus Raspbian's) messy and outdated Python packages.
@@TheDiveO thanks
Python is the new BASIC, it’s true.
People look down on 1980s BASIC, but if you ever looked at the 6502’s instruction set, you’d realize what a miracle it was.
@@RamLaska I started on Z80, so I only later learned how lucky I was. Then moved to 68000 and afterwards crashed back into the lowlands of x86 segmentation.
TheDiveO
How did you like the Z80?
I’m trying to learn 6502 assembly now, and boy, it’s limited!
I’m amazed that anyone got anything done in that architecture.
Yeah, x86 addressing was a pain, although I think the 6502 was vaguely similar, except with 256-byte blocks of memory, rather than 64k.
I’m starting to think that the 16-bit era was the real sweet spot. Not as limiting as the 8, but not as boring as 32.
what can I build for $35 this year. :) Great philosophy!
@1:03:31 On a RPi3/4 add "arm_64bit=1" to the config.txt and if the OS is current it should bootup with a 64-bit kernel
I so very nearly agree with Raspberry Pi 4 being a PC replacement. I was so impressed with mine until it really really struggles with CZcams. I work at an educational charity with little money but lots of kids needing to use PCs. I can't wait for the day that the massive, out of date, slow donated PCs we have can be replaced by Pis but as we need CZcams and other video platforms for our teaching it's not yet.
Converting hdmi to vga consumes a lot of power and my pi displays the lightening symbol in the top right corner. I must upgrade my screen hardware to accept hdmi. great talk. thank you.
I'll pay the premium price at RPi.org for Pi Zero's to use on the ZX-HD: a HDMI interface for the ZX Spectrum.
It's not really educational, but very RPi.org-origin related, and the Pi Zero was the enabler for that project, wouldn't have been able to do it otherwise.
The RPi Zero is a really awesome product! Well Done Eben and collegues at RPi.org! And thanks Neil for this awesome video!
'Middle class boys' got 200 notes from some piggy bank in the early 90's, whereas 'working class boys' could spend the entire summer picking Strawberries at 15 to spend £465 on a Beeb Model B [ +DFS ] in 1982.
That's what Health and safety did, limited your ability to sell your sweat before you were 18!
Thanks to my older Brother I felt privileged all my life, he shared and I got addicted to coding. [ he's one of our hometowns millionaires now :-D ]
thought he looked and sounded a little like johnny vaughan .. lol
so raspbery pi was jason stratham's side gig
Great interview, I would of liked to have also heard about there involvement with the RISC-V processor, will they be making a product based on it?
Great interview Neil :)
Damn, I didn't get the T-shirt either!
Nice guy, interesting guy. One or both parents ex-army?
Escribo en español para que el vídeo influencer español, mexicano, chileno y argentino comprenda: waoo que tan diferente es invitar a alguien relevante para el entrenamiento basado en computadoras, en lugar de buscar visitas invitando amiguetes al mismo nivel de ignorancia y arrogancia.
Great content THK , congrats!
1:05:28 For video encoding, I'd agree, although there's been pushes (mainly by Intel IIRC?) to make an open source stack for that as well, in the form of vaapi/vdpau. For the camera, maybe I'm missing something, but I'd tend to disagree ; there has to be a way to write an UVC driver (formerly GSPCA), even if it depends on low level features. The only thing I could see is some sort of firmware-driven initialization or link negotiation, but seeing as the Pi cams are fairly simple devices, I'd be surprised if that was necessary?
EDIT: Then again, that initialization/negotiation bit could be happening on the SoC side of things, making it hard if not impossible to merge into upstream kernel.
EDIT2: Also that being said, the next point about "RMS rules" does stand, and in fact, "RMS rules" aren't something anyone seems to adhere too strictly to - amdgpu is an open-source driver but needs firmware blobs, so does iwlwifi (Intel Wi-Fi, most chips these days) ; and in general most platforms have built-in firmware (or microcode) that's potentially upgrade-able from the OS (most often done in BIOS/UEFI though) to drive low-level devices. I think it "makes sense" for the Pi to distribute those as separate files for ease of upgrade, but I don't see why they wouldn't eventually join the linux-firmware git and put their firmware in there, so that most distributions can run "as-is" just by packaging linux-firmware as usual!
Jason Statham starring as Eben Upton
I can't even handle the amount of sexiness in this interview. Two bald beautiful men talking about the intricacies of affordable hardware design. You know how to make me happy Neil. I'm spent.
I like Ben and what he's tried to do. There are many reasons why it won't be the same as the good old days of the 8bit machines. Nevertheless you cannot say the PI isn't successful. The secret is the product support. Many SBC came and went but the PI stayed strong. My daughter is 7 and I showed her the BBC B just yesterday - hello world program and her eyes somehow lit up, the magic is still there. It isn't quite there with the PI even though we have a pi 400 which seems to have the same elements. I'm not sure why not. Maybe its just because its full of distraction. There is one thing; Bens voice sounds like mine if I try to make it deeper than it is. This reminds me of Elisabeth Holmes every time, once you hear it you can't unhear it.
The problem with pi4 is that Retropie is very slow to release a compatible version.
great interview
raspberry pi has reinvigorated my interest in linux so much, and given me many, many hours of retro gaming fun aswell,
i even picked up a bit of C coding.
creating computers for education, and the enthousiasts/gamers running away with it, sounds like a bit like Sir Clive Sinclair's story :D
i guess that's British computing for you, some work, but a lot of play :D
i now own 4 raspberry pis :D
have used the raspberry pi 4, 4GB model as a desktop for a couple of days, and i can say it's getting pretty damn close to a desktop computer now, amd i'm so glad the latest iteration has usb3
thanks for the good times.
I’m always curious about it, but I don’t see any comparisons about there: how does the Pi 4’s general speed compare to an intel x86 derivative?
If the original Pi was equivalent to a PowerPC G3, does that mean that the 4 is about the speed of a Core Duo? Or early-gen i5?
If the latter, that’d be amazing. If the former, it’s still impressive.
i'm guessing tea breaks are longer in quarantine :D
Absolutely. Quarantine has meant I can get to chat to some amazing guests and I'm going to make the most of it!
what about 2560x1600 support on Pi4?
what does Eben say about sata support? He garbled something that sounds like rust, but I couldn't understand it.
He was saying that they don't expect to support "spinning rust" and will be more likely to move to NVMe support
Jumped up typewriter? More like the chefs kiss of paper weights!
I'd agree that teaching in the 90s and 2000s was terrible, it was hard to get much in the way of support and most of the UK teaching was more towards "ICT" skills (using Windows, Word, etc) which was fine (I have my CLAIT certificate and all) but having some direction then in learning to code would mean I wouldn't be such a terrible coder now :-p
Hopefully, the PI and connected products are helping to shift that.
Nice to see Jason Statham on your channel, oh wait...
Not meaning to be remotely rude, but could someone help out with the captioning? I’m a pretty international guy*, but there are times when the accent is difficult for me.
*Not originally from the U.S., and have been watching British shows on PBS since the early nineties.
I wish they had spent as much time working on the fragility of the MicroSD slot as they did on the Micro HDMI ports.
My word I thought the movie Face off was fictional but they really did it?
jason statham on the mancave?