I got up early to try and get my hands on one of the first Raspberry Pi’s to be released, a developer release if you will.
Not the fruit and pastry kind of Pie. The Raspberry Pi is a small cost-effective computer the size of a hand. It contains HDMI, RCA out, USB, audio, Ethernet & an SD card slot. Runs linux and can be used to learn / hack and do interesting projects on low power consumption. Lots of interesting possibilites. See a BBC Video on the Raspberry Pi
A brief glimpse at what might be, as site partially loads
An announcement was posted to mark the 29th Feb 2012 6am, everyone expected pre-ordering of the first batch of Pis. Electronics companies RS & Farnell were announced as distributing and building the units for sale worldwide. Needless to say, both sites crashed within a minute. And continuous news coverage on the Raspberry Pi is hammering both sites.
(Raspberry Pi Minecraft logo above from http://b3njee567.com/raspberry-pi-minecraft-logo/)
Farnell, 3hrs later, are still struggling to keep their site up. Sporadically loading, but they seem to be the only site actually taking orders.
Its absolutely great for the Raspberry Pi that demand is high, I know there will be a lot of frustration over the badly managed distributors websites, however a very good sign for the project. A positive step forward in affordable computing and hopefully a great tool for learning, hacking and innovation.
@Raspberry_Pi on Twitter keeping the world informed
RS sites boinged around too, and went offline
I managed to get through to the sales team on the phone for RS, after nearly 40 mins on the phone, but they were only registering interest. The RS techs soon cottoned on actually and redirected traffic from their search so all terms for Raspberry Pi to redirect to a static HTML page to register your interest in it. Good move. However you are now waiting for a call back or email….
I have managed to get the Pi in a cart on Farnell, 3hr 15m later I have managed to check out, but as of yet there has not been a confirmation email!
Final Order - checked out with Pi