Using a Raspberry Pi

Before the 1980s (and even for some time after that), computers were huge, taking up large air-conditioned rooms, and requiring massive amounts of energy and a highly trained staff. Today's hand-held smartphones are far more powerful than those behemoths and require almost no training at all. As the power of computers continues to increase and the size continues to decrease, the physical devices humans use to interact with a computer (such as keyboards and mice) can take more space than the computer itself. The term "fat finger" means more than just making a mistake on the keyboard; it now represents the limiting factor on user interfaces.

The Raspberry Pi is one of the more popular examples of this great reduction of computer size where the actual computer—CPU, memory, and interface ports—is the smallest component of the system, with the keyboard and monitor dwarfing the tiny case housing the electronics. Indeed, there are some...