In the beginning was the beginning. IT involved wires, scattered capacitors and a hot soldering iron. The original computer nerd emerged, eyes bleached in acrid smoke, from mom’s basement. Flash forward 40 years and high street devices are sleek, shiny and eye wateringly expensive.
But there is another way. It is championed by tiny devices that connect different systems together without frills. The ordinary person has little idea that linux based systems, despite being freewave, compete on an even field with the most well known brands in computing.
Back in the early 2000s, a group of people at the University of Cambridge noticed that students applying for computer science degrees barely knew how to code. They addressed this by creating the Raspberry Pi. To keep costs low and flexibility high, they used Linux, an open-source operating system. Unlike Windows or macOS, Linux is:
✅ Free – No licenses, no fees
✅ Customizable – Developers can modify it however they want
✅ Lightweight – Can run on tiny hardware
Because Linux/Unix had been used for servers and embedded systems for decades, it was a perfect fit for Raspberry Pi. It made the Pi flexible for everything from education to robotics, home automation and IoT projects. Older tech nerds began pulling crusted soldering flux out of creaking fishing boxes.
You can see it, can’t you? A tiny computer that is robust and very connective by design. Hackers & makers loved its versatility. IoT developers found it perfect for smart applications that require more scope. Businesses used it for automation and prototyping. When you combine Raspberry Pi with Arduino or an IoT module, things begin to get a little spicy. You’ve combined connectivity with switches and a bulletproof operating system.
Now, there is a downside to all this free, cheap and functional, it is not quite geared to the mass market. Mass market tools are exactly those shiny, brushed aluminum, boxes that plug and play. Even though MacOS is Unix there is a cultural disconnect. Linux has been humming along in back rooms since 1991 and has not dented mass culture. Even IBM quietly cherry picked the Red Hat for 34 billion dollars in 2019. Not a bad price for freeware with some tech support.
As IoT develops, the key role of edge computing will come into the frame. Scale demands these tiny computing devices extract much of the bulk from data streams. The principle of a massive mainframe data center is a fixture of sixties movies, not cutting edge connected devices. Agility beats bulk, so much of the data will be processed nearer to source to avoid transmission cost. That size and agility combination is the real secret sauce.
