We get asked a lot where the name “Raspberry Pi” came from. Bits of the name came from
different trustees. It’s one of the very few successful bits of design by committee I’ve seen, and
to be honest, I hated it at first. (I have since come to love the name, because it works really
well—but it took a bit of getting used to since I’d been calling the project the “ABC Micro” in my
head for years.) It’s “Raspberry” because there’s a long tradition of fruit names in computer
companies (besides the obvious, there are the old Tangerine and Apricot computers—and we
like to think of the Acorn as a fruit as well). “Pi” is a mangling of “Python”, which we thought
early on in development would be the only programming language available on a much less
powerful platform than the Raspberry Pi we ended up with. As it happens, we still recommend
Python as our favourite language for learning and development, but there is a world of other
language options you can explore on the Raspberry Pi too.