Comment by giobox
20 hours ago
There was definitely usecase overlap due to the presence of the GPIO, but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't - stuff like the PiHole and Retropie projects, and never used their GPIO pins at all.
Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores a huge amount of the ways in which actual end users interacted with the thing, and even the way it was sold and marketed. Upton was trying to replace early hacker-friendly home computers like the BBC Micro/Apple II, for a new generation.
> but huge numbers of Pis ended up doing things a microcontroller can't
Mate you know full well it was multiple things... Marketed to education as an actual computer, to the maker demographic as a microcontroller, as a way to learn coding but also robotics etc
>Thinking of any of the early Pis as microcontrollers ignores blah blah blah
Same applies to thinking of them as SBCs