14 DAY TRIAL // We talked about the Raspberry Pi just about every time there was anything new to say about it and, now, we have something particularly interesting to share.
It isn't just that the credit card-sized PC has started selling, it's that the number of orders people placed within the first few hours (or possibly less) was enough to crash the servers of both retail partners involved in the commercialization.
This happened even though sales are being limited to one per customer.
Premier Farnell or RS Components have been enlisted, but people will have to wait a bit before getting their turn at this point.
“Both websites are currently experiencing heavy load, and international customers may find that Raspberry Pi is not available yet in their territory. Please be patient, and consider checking back in a few hours' time,” the foundation says.
“We've temporarily changed to a static site, while we're experiencing a very high level of traffic for the launch of the Raspberry Pi. The full site will return once traffic levels have subsided, hopefully later on today.”
Currently, only the $35 / 26 Euro and the $25 / 18.5 Euro models are available, or they will be, as soon as sales resume.
The latter was even reworked to include double the initially intended RAM capacity. It has 256 MB now.
The oddest thing about this small item is that it wasn't even aimed at consumers originally. It started off as a low-cost computer for the educational market. Students were supposed to use it for learning the basics of programming and computer “hacking.”
Once the media, us included, got wind of it, though, it couldn't stop from keeping an eye on it. After all, it is not every day that someone finds something so small and unassuming that, nonetheless, trounces NVIDIA Tegra 2 and iPhone 4S in terms of graphics. And since it even has HDMI, it can turn any TV into a SmartTV. It is no wonder that demand proved so overwhelming.