How to shrink a PC into a TINY package and then charge only $25 for it

Can you take all the parts of a PC, fit them onto a board that is the size of a stick of gum and then charge $25 for it? Seeing is believing:

The first line of the video is so simple, but also mind-blowing:

This little device is the prototype version of a Raspberry Pi computer. It is a little tiny device that is a computer on a USB stick. It’s got HDMI at one end and USB at the other end and the idea is that you plug it into an HDMI TV, you can plug in a USB keyboard and use it as a computer to be able to learn programming, to be able to runTwitter, Facebook, whatever. And also to understand the whole process of programming.

The website for the device is:

Raspberry Pi Foundation

According to the web site, these are the specs for this tiny computer:

* 700MHz ARM11
* 128MB of SDRAM
* OpenGL ES 2.0
* 1080p30 H.264 high-profile decode
* Composite and HDMI video output
* USB 2.0
* SD/MMC/SDIO memory card slot
* General-purpose I/O
* Open software (Ubuntu, Iceweasel, KOffice, Python)

This is more enough to run Linux. The first ASUS Eee netbook computer (the machine that launched the whole netbook craze) also used Linux and it had an Intel Celeron processor running at 630 MHz.

Is there anything like this in the marketplace? The GumStix is probably the best-known PC-on-a-USB-stick computer:

Gumstix Products

The difference is that all of their computers cost more than $100. Here is something else very small, but again it is $150:

Tiny $150 PC Fits in a Power-Plug

The key thing with the Raspberry Pi will be the price point. It helps that David Braben, the person behind it, has a reputation. This article talks about his background

David Braben is a very well-known game developer who runs the UK development studio Frontier Developments, but is just as well known for being the co-developer of Elite.

Over his career his studio has brought us the Rollercoaster Tycoon series, Thrillville, Lost Winds, and most recently Kinectimals. In the background, however, Braben has been trying to tackle another problem: getting programming and general learning of how computers work back into schools.