The idea behind a tiny and cheap computer  came in 2006, when Eben Upton, (left) lecturing and working in admissions at Cambridge University noticed a distinct drop in the skills levels of the A Level students applying to read Computer Science in each academic year when he came to interview them.

In the 1990s where most of the applicants were coming to interview as hobbyist programmers, in the 2000s a typical applicant now had experience only with web design, sometimes not even that. Fewer were applying to the course every year. Something changed the way the young were interacting with computers.
Eben and university colleagues like Rob Mullins  (left) and Alan Mycroft  (right) both now trustees of the Raspberry Pi Foundation batted around ideas about what had happened in schools to cause this change.

A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons into using Word and Excel, or writing web pages; the end of the dot-com boom; the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that  a happy earlier generation had fun and frustration learning to program on.

Noy much any small group of people can do to address an inadequate school curriculum or the end of a financial bubble. But Raspberry Pi founders felt that they could try to do something about the situation where computers had become so expensive and arcane, that programming experimentation on them was forbidden by parents; and to find a platform that, like those older home computers, could boot into a programming environment.