> Plug computing and Linksys routers weren't cheap, and the Pi was.

For their time (20 years ago), they certainly were cheap. $100 or so for a small power efficient box that could run almost a whole Linux distribution was an amazing bargain. Before that, you needed a good-sized desktop or server to do anything involving a Unix-like OS, or paid dearly for the convenience of a laptop.

And it wasn't much before that, that running Unix on any microcomputer was just a dream.

It's hard to comprend just how amazingly affordable computing has become in such a short amount of time.

Do you realise that a $100 is a fortune to the demographic that I specified? For that price, those devices are so out of reach that they might as well just not exist.

I remember that time in my life very well. I literally had around $50 in my local currency in the coin box, and that was it. Hand me down computers were unavailable where I was.

Everyone had one anyway because they needed a router. It was "free". Used ones were common too.

Ok, but that doesn’t mean that the Pi was important in getting most Linux or BSD tools working under ARM, as was the claim above.

Yes, it reached a wide audience, they did a lot of great stuff getting capable dev boards out to a lot of people. But fully functional Linux on ARM pre-dates the Pi significantly.

(I’d argue the NSLU2 and sheevaplug were both pretty affordable, at sub-$100 too, but the Pi definitely upped the game there)

In the chicken and egg problem of getting support for ARM software, the Raspberry Pi Foundation was the one that unilaterally plopped a ready-to-go (if very weak), low cost chicken in front of everyone. For that, I think they deserve some credit. Sure they built in top of the work of others - so let's acknowledge everyone involved in the process rather than pretend that one party deserves fame exclusively. It was a community effort :)

> getting support for ARM software

It is my contention that this support was largely already present. That's all.

Pi did great work getting cheap boards out to people, and put a lot of effort into education and community building. They exposed a huge number of people to the possibilities of non-x86 computing that otherwise might not have been. So indeed let's credit them with that, it's all great stuff!

But it's quite revisionist to say they helped get linux or BSD or their tools onto the platform, IMHO.

The wide audience itself is a big motivator to get them working on Arm.

This. The ARM ecosystem didn't get a good prebuilt Docker container story until the Pi4, but it was somewhat doable on the Pi3 if you were willing to recompile 80% of containers from scratch. I can only guess that additional adoption fueled the critical mass of incentives for building for ARM as a rule rather than as an exception.

>it was somewhat doable on the Pi3 if you were willing to recompile 80% of containers from scratch.

If Pi3 was so popular, why didn't it exist as a binary?

The pi3 CPU used an older ARM spec, which had issues with producing good binaries for e. g. Go-based builds (I remember that quite vividly).

Beyond that, I can only hypothesize that Docker on non-x86_64 (or multiarch Docker, in general), was very difficult to kick-start for whatever reason. This may have been compounded by the fact that Docker wasn't as broadly adopted by hobbyists back then, so demand for ARM builds want that great.

https://gist.github.com/tyrell/2963c6b121f79096ee0008f5a47cf... looking at this, it seems that debian added it at least 3 years ago and even in 2016 there was a binary, unless you knew about it and it sucked.

But the systems already worked on Arm, that's the point!

Getting more attention to the platform was definitely a good thing, exposing more people to a different architecture, to having a machine cheap enough to just play with, to all sorts of great stuff.

But Linux and BSD themselves were already mature on arm by that point.

Indeed. Debian had full ARM support for years before the Pi, very mature, and was really the only reason the Pi project could even choose ARM. If not for Debian's work, which the Pi relies upon, they'd have never been able to bootstrap.

Debian project also deserves some credit - so let's credit them. There's enough credit to go around got everyone who helped to bring this about.