> the pi is a solution waiting for a problem

I don't fully agree, sure you could repurpose things like old routers to get a cheap headless linux board but you were often left with limited ram and flash (even for the time), limited IO and you had to jump though hoops to even get things like DD-WRT/OpenWRT on a router (The easier to flash routers with more flash/ram/io often demanded a premuim). The martket was ripe for a cheap linux SMB which the hardest part of flashing the OS for your avg Windows user being having to use Win32DiskImager.

When the Pi was first released us geeks were not its target market either. They were aiming to improve the accessability of affordable computers kids could program on. The founders had grew up in a world where every home computer started into a programming language interpreter (such as the BASIC prompt you got when powering up your Spectrum) and they were running in to college kids(16-18 year old education) wanting to do programming but had little to no programming experience. So they wanted to create something cheap so it was not the end of the world if the kid killed it, Something they could plug into their bedroom TV's and start to code.

From the Gen History of the RPI on elinux wiki (there is a full write up of the history some where on the RPI site, but searching their archives suck :-P) - https://elinux.org/RPi_General_History

> From a situation in the 1990s where most of the kids applying were coming to interview as experienced hobbyist programmers, the landscape in the 2000s was very different; a typical applicant might only have done a little web design.

> Something had changed the way kids were interacting with computers. A number of problems were identified: the colonisation of the ICT curriculum with lessons on using Word and Excel, or writing webpages; the end of the dot-com boom; and the rise of the home PC and games console to replace the Amigas, BBC Micros, Spectrum ZX and Commodore 64 machines that people of an earlier generation learned to program on.

I can back up the ICT curriculum claim. When I was in secondary school most people in my higher ICT class GCSE coursework was based around using spreadsheets (and the vast number of computers in the school were Acorn Achimedes so they were not even using Excel, I was the outsider who wanted to program something). Thankfully the ICT curriculum has improved since.

It wasn't until the Pi was announced, we saw it and thought Dam, a cheap linux SBC and we eat up their inital production run.

> everything the pi is touted to do, you can either accomplish with existing general computing or something like an arduino.

At the time of the Pi's launch having a networked arduino was a pain in the ass and expensive (I know because I was using them) and existing general computing was either too expensive, hard to get started with and as I said above often offered limited IO/Flash/Ram (I know the first Pi only had 256/512meg of ram, but compared to the other inexpensive options of the time that was a fuck ton).

The Pi launched at a $35 price point (Ok you needed a display/keyboard/mouse but SD Card/keyboard/mouse were also cheap and many kids already had a TV compatible with the Pi (or another computer) which did bump the inital setup cost a bit) where an offical arduino Uno/Original was also around the $35 price point back then, heck the offical Uno is still selling for €20 today. So for only a little more you could get something that would be able to program on the device you were wanting to program and you were not tying up the family computer (The lockdown has shown that many kids in a household are having to share computers to do remote learning).

Sure us geeks might have a few Pi's lying around in our desks as toys but they are still used for meaningful projects. I these them for Octoprint, Home Assisant, a departure board (https://ukdepartureboards.co.uk/) and a systems display monitor. I also keep one around for basically for usbprog alone without the need of having to use usb as I can use the onboard IO.

So while you see the Pi as a solution waiting for a problem, I saw it more as a solution for problems we didn't realise we had until the solution became affordable to the point it was considered throwaway / a solution that lowered the cost of entry to fixing problems that we didn't want to throw more expensive hardware onto.