Pete Lomas - Archives of IT

“I think the real turning point in my life was a guy called Graham Beech who actually gave me the time and the access to my first computer then set me on a course that eventually caused me to design Raspberry Pi. I think the thing that really inspired me was when we could turn kids away from being consumers into being creators; how inspirational they are in what they think about what they want to create in an environment where they don’t think anything is impossible.”

“I find it quite amazing that a little project that we’d had at Cambridge University to build roughly 3,000 units then exploded onto the scene of makers and the community and now we’re touching on 30 million units.”

Pete Lomas and a colleague designed the Raspberry Pi educational computer to help turn young people from consumers into creators. The original plan in 2008 called for 3,000 units: there are now close to 30 million of these small and inexpensive used to educate young people into how to design digital systems of all types. Pete went further and turned Raspberry Pi into a charity with other industrialists and academics. Raspberry Pi came out of a long career in electronic engineering which included teaching and research at Manchester University and commercial work developing digital systems for clients. Today Pete took some time away from his hectic schedule to talk to Richard Sharpe about his life and career so far.

Early Life

Pete Lomas was born in 1955 in Salford, near Manchester. His father was a foreman electrician for the building company, George Wimpey. Pete’s mother was a housewife and looked after Pete and his older brother.

His parents encouraged him and his brother, he says: “I don’t ever remember them saying, ‘You can’t do that’ and that’s something I’ve tried to do with my child as well. … I’ve also brought forward that technically; perhaps nothing is impossible. We just need signs to figure out how it works and then engineering can actually make some use of it for the benefit of society.”

Pete says that his love of building things was inspired by his father, however, a trip to Manchester at the age of thirteen really set his future ambitions in motion. He explains: “In those days Manchester was the centre of electronics and computers with ICL and Ferranti, and all the offshoot material that they didn’t want ended up in junk shops on a road called Tib Street. I remember it quite fondly. One day, after a visit, I came home with a great big piece of telephone exchange. The family were absolutely horrified, a) because it was large, and b) I had spent, probably too much money on it. But I had an absolute plan with it. I took it to pieces, cleaned all the parts up, and then somehow, I managed to put that together to make a noughts and crosses machine. You could dial in with a normal telephone dial, it would make the move and then it would make its counter move. I didn’t realise at the time, but I had just made a fixed-program computer. This was well before really computers were in the curriculum.”

Education

Having passed his Eleven Plus, Pete went to a local grammar school. He describes school as a “little bit of a disaster”. He was interested in building things and enjoyed the lessons which related to this but failed to be engaged by the curriculum in other subjects.

Having gained a number of O levels, Pete decided to leave school at the age of sixteen in 19971 to transfer to Bolton Institute of Technology to study for an ONC in electrical and electronic engineering. He says: “That course for me was brilliant. The first week we started in physics and they introduced us to a real physical Pelton wheel. Suddenly, those equations that I had struggled with in physics at school, actually came out of the page and suddenly presented themselves in front of you, and you suddenly realise; that’s what it’s all about.” He adds: “I want to relate things to the physical world; that’s what gives me the buzz, because then I can see how that might be extended to create something else.”

The college had a PDP-8 made by Digital Equipment Corporation of which Pete says; “it was the first computer I saw as something that you could get close enough to touch.” The computer was for degree students only however, the technician said that Pete could use it at lunchtimes. Pete adds: “That interaction changed my life. He got me back at lunchtime and sat me down in front of this terminal.” Pete was shown how to “10 print ‘Hello World’ 20 go to 10”, however, the technician did not tell him how to stop the programme printing and with Pete trying various options, the technician eventually helped him out. Pete says: “It made me realise there is no such thing in computing as a stupid question. If you don’t know the answer, you ask. The only thing that you have to be wary about of course is the stupid answer. I think that’s massively important, because we need to encourage collaboration, which means asking questions, and admitting when you don’t know what the answer is.”

With this realisation, Pete says his level of engagement across his course increased; he was more comfortable asking for further explanation when he didn’t understand something. He also ended up spending every lunchtime in the computer facility, learning to write more programs.

He says: “I’ve come to realise that your career is a journey and that journey has hills in it and it also has the benefit of the fact, going down the other side where you can coast along. But getting up that hill sometimes can be really, really, difficult. Students find that as well. That’s the point where they just need a little bit of help to get over the brow of the hill onto the next thing. It’s not rote teaching; it’s teaching almost by necessity. The thing I think he (the technician) did for me is, he turned around my educational career from being something where you need to learn this, to I want to learn this. How does this help me with this? How does this connect to this? Tell me about that. Tell me about this. That was the point at which it changed. My goal then, and probably still now is, to learn as much as I can about this wonderfully adaptable technology. I see computers as a tool, always as a tool, to do something better elsewhere. … I think, you know, my engagement has always been, a maker, computers, software, join it all together, and make something wonderful.”

At the same time as studying for his course, learning how to programme the computer in his lunchtime, Pete also learned how to keep the machine running by chatting with the service engineer.

Manchester University

Having gained his diploma in July 1973 Pete applied for and was accepted at Manchester University, Department of Computer Science, which was working on the Atlas machine, had close ties with Ferranti and ICL and is where Tom Kilburn taught.

Pete chose Manchester because they had a hardware bias in the course content. He says: “It wasn’t just programming; it was, computers, and computer-aided computer design. How do we get the computer to help us build the next computer? It was a magnet for me because we had the programming, but in the laboratory experiments we had bits of hardware to experiment with and do projects on, and each year those experiments would get more sophisticated as more technology became available.”

Desperate to have his own computer, Pete set out to build one and became a founder member of the Manchester Computer Club. While some members went down the 6800, the 6809 routes, Pete opted to follow the Z80 route.

In 1976, having gained his BSc in Computer Science, Pete stayed on to study for his MSc with a thesis entitled: ‘Order code implementation in a high-performance minicomputer’. He explains: “I was very interested in computer architecture and how instructions in memory get executed and there are so many different methodologies for doing that. So, I decided to do an MSc actually researching it and figuring out how to do it well in a new design that we were doing.”

Having completed his MSc in 1978, Pete started on his PhD and did some teaching which he says he thoroughly enjoyed. However, he never completed his PhD as he got side-tracked by a request to make a T-shirt design machine after he had demonstrated some technology at the university’s open day. Having decided to leave and take up the offer, he built a prototype but unfortunately, the project folded when the backers disappeared.

Pete then became a freelance consultant and development manager, he explains what happened next: “The company that I was working with (Kemitron) also were involved in video security and recording cameras to tape. When you are recording cameras to tape, if they’re standard video cameras they’re asynchronous, so you don’t know where the frames of data are going to be. They’re not aligned and so you have to run an extra cable out to every single camera to say ‘You need to be in sync with this signal’ so that we’re all singing from the same hymn sheet when we record them to tape. … We realised that this frame store could be adapted to save having to run that extra wire, and could be used to, if you like, cue the images to go to tape.” Pete created a product and then followed it up a couple of years later with another one called Uniplex. The product sold really well.”

Mosiac Technologies

At the same time as working with this Manchester based company, Pete set up his own company called Mosaic Technologies an electronic design consultancy based which was initially based at his home. As the business grew, Pete hired staff and moved to Carrington Business Park in Manchester where it continued to flourish and expand. In 1996 he was approached with an offer to buy the company and sold it in 1997 before starting over with the launch of Norcott Technology Ltd.

Norcott Technology Ltd

In 1997, Pete established Norcott Technology Ltd an electronic design and contract manufacturing company based in Widnes with 64 employees.

Pete says: “We manufacture products for our customers, most of which have been acquired through our design side, not all. … It’s all about optimisation and doing things better. We do a lot of industrial and scientific. I love getting involved with the scientific things. We build things for CERN, and that’s always fascinating. I don’t know whether electronics is allowed to be funky, but because it’s special, for a very particular application, like the Large Hadron Collider, it’s got features that you wouldn’t see in normal commercial products. I love all that sort of stuff.”

Having started the business, Pete was Managing Director until he took advice from a course at Lancaster University, he explains: “I went to Lancaster University on a course about small companies and SMEs, and particularly owner-manager businesses, and, it was really there they convinced me that, if I’m passionate about the engineering, why am I Managing Director? Why don’t I give that role to somebody who’s perfectly capable and probably actually more capable of being a managing director than I was? I’m not ceding control of the technical things, the things I’m passionate about, but it’ll probably be a happier life, and they were dead right.”

He is now Director of Engineering. He adds: “We choose titles; I would have been perfectly happy with, the guy who designs stuff.”

Raspberry Pi

In 2007, Pete invented the Raspberry Pi. The idea came after he met and chatted with

Alan Mycroft, Professor of Computer Science at Cambridge, who had noticed that children were not engaging with writing software; they had become consumers rather than creators. Mycroft had the idea for a little computer to reengage the students in practical programming.

Pete adds: “I went down to Cambridge in the October for a meeting, and literally within half an hour I said, ‘We’ve just got to do this. … I saw this as a potential way of getting back to a situation where they could do this (reengage with practical programming).”

The price point for the Raspberry Pi was 25 dollars and 35 dollars. Pete says: “It’s the right ballpark, because it’s under the threshold where people are prepared to take a risk with it. So, if you blow it up which is the worst that could happen, then it was only going to cost you the equivalent of a meal for four out to replace it, and for something that was going to advance your learning and your skills, you could see that as being worth it.”

Pete, together with the others involved in the project decided that the Raspberry Pi should be established under a charitable foundation status. He says: “I think the decision there was one of mission. I would have found it incredibly difficult to say, ‘We’re here to help with the education of kids, buy this computer, and I’m going to make a load of money out of it. Thank you very much.’ It just, didn’t sit well. On the counterpoint to that we had got our own businesses, I’ve got something that puts food on the table, so that wasn’t a concern. The other underlying reason, which is probably more, much more important, is, it takes me back to Graham (the technician at Manchester University who inspired Pete), and what he did for me. This was an opportunity to play that forward with other students to give them access to a computer that was low priced, that was the thing that was most important. The mission was very clear. It wasn’t to make money; it was to invest in the future of society.”

The charity soon gained an army of supporters behind its mission, they helped in many different ways, from putting in time, effort, in some cases money, or writing resources, or supporting the team. Pete says: “If you look at the breadth and depth of support that you can get for the Raspberry Pi, that’s what’s made it also a success.”

There are around 28 million Raspberry Pi computers in circulation, all across the globe.

Pete recently judged at the Coolest Projects run by CoderDojo in Ireland which has now become part of the Pi family. It’s a competition for children to show off their projects: Pete says; “I was absolutely blown away. The amount of innovation that these kids some as young as ten and eleven, were actually demonstrating was fantastic.”

In talking about AI and the potential issues of the future and whether it may be the youngsters growing up with today’s Raspberry Pi who will fix them, Pete says: “I think it’s more that they had a Raspberry Pi when they were young, they became interested in it, they became passionate about learning and understanding. That then drove them on through their career to go on and learn about things that are faster, better, more interesting than a Raspberry Pi, dare I say it, because it’s something to get people on that journey and when that journey turns into the 20-lane motorway, and it goes in all different directions, it’s for them to choose which way they want to go. The Raspberry Pi just shows them a bit of that road, a bit of the opportunity: here’s a bit of AI, here’s a bit of robot, here’s a bit of, just doing some straight computation, here’s a bit of doing IOT. I think the thing that has really inspired me is that last year’s Coolest Projects, so many of the projects that the kids came up with were for the benefit of society. They were trying to make a positive, either environmental or social benefit with their project. That was tremendous and I think that bodes well for the future.”

Interview with Pete Lomas