"As the launch of the $25 PC gets ever closer (sometime next month), members of the Raspberry Pi team have found time to start blogging about the history of the project. Eben Upton, director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has been working on the project for many years, and decided to share a couple of very early prototypes for the $25 PC with the community. The 2006 edition of the PC used an Atmel ATmega644 microcontroller. It ran at 22.1MHz with 512K of SRAM. Compare that to the final version of the PC, which will use a 700MHz ARM11 processor and 128MB/256MB of SDRAM. Five years clearly brings a massive leap in performance. For those of us happy to play around with components at this level, Eben has made the schematics and PCB layout available to download (ZIP file). Armed with this information you can create your very own 2006 Raspberry Pi machine."