Raspberry Pi - the machine you are allowed to break

It belongs on a site about learning networking because of what it changed about practice rather than what it computes. Before it, a laboratory meant borrowed equipment or a simulator; afterwards, a working machine with a real network interface cost less than a textbook. A learner can configure it, break it, reinstall it and break it again, which is how the subject is actually learned and is precisely what shared laboratory equipment does not permit.

In working networks it turned up anyway, as small routers, probes, monitoring nodes, console servers and packet captures on a shelf. That is the ordinary fate of a cheap general-purpose computer with an Ethernet port: somebody finds the job it does well and the job stops needing a purpose-built device.

It also demonstrates the arrangement the making milestones describe, at the smallest possible scale. A foundation with no factory designed a board around a licensed processor architecture, had the silicon fabricated by somebody else and the boards assembled by somebody else again, and sold the result for the price of a meal.