Just when we thought the auctions experience couldn’t get any more exciting, a rather brilliant thing has happened. A well-wisher who wants to remain anonymous (and whom, when I am back in the country, I intend to buttonhole and buy a pint or six for) paid £989 for one of the ten beta boards we are auctioning at the moment, and has donated it to the Computer Museum at the Centre for Computing History.
We met Jason Fitzpatrick, director of the Museum, a couple of weeks ago at a talk we gave in Cambridge; we’d already been hoping to work with him and the Centre for Computing History on some of their schools outreach work, so this is a very happy coming together. He’s as excited as we are about the donation, and says:
We will be purchasing a number of the (somewhat cheaper) Raspberry Pis to take out for school visits and help promote the programming in schools initiative – something we very strongly believe in.”
The Raspberry Pi is an unusual addition to the museum’s collection, which is largely made up of hardware from the 1960s-1980s. The museum, like us, hopes that the Raspberry Pi will bootstrap a new era of computing in schools. Jason says he wants to be able to point to the museum’s Raspberry Pi in future years and say: ”and this is the computer that changed everything” …
There are still six of the very limited edition of beta boards, the first Raspberry Pis ever made, left to go in our charity auction. All proceeds from the auction will go to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s charitable work. We are amazed at the generosity people have been showing so far; thank you and good luck to everybody who has been bidding.
