How did the Raspberry Pi get its name?

Question

How did the Raspberry Pi get its very famous name? And who came up with the idea to call a budget computer after an item of food?

score 19 · Answer 1 · edited Jun 16 '15 at 18:28

Raspberry is from an old tradition: there was Tangerine Computer Systems. In the mid-1980s there was a British company called Apricot Computers which competed with Apple (yet another fruit) and PC computers. Even before that there was also another British company called Acorn (being a nut, it qualifies as fruit).

And of course there's also: BlackBerry, Cherry Corporation (now known as ZF Electronics), Papaya Studio, etc...

Meaning that if you want to start a new company and don't want to get sued, you'd better choose any name but that of a fruit.

score 13 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 16 '15 at 17:05

13

According to this question on the offical forum, the founders wanted a fruit name for nostalgia and Pi comes from Python.

answered Jun 16 '15 at 17:05

Jacobm001

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score 6 · Answer 3 · answered Jun 17 '15 at 06:32

As we all can easily imagine (and as was said before), a fruit name was chosen because of tradition. What is not so well known, is that Pi does stand for:

Python Interpreter.

It was originally planned to equip the Pi with a built-in interpreter for python, just like the C64 had a built-in Basic iterpreter. You can read more about this at the Pi's german Wikipedia page.

How did the Raspberry Pi get its name?

3 Answers3