“About five years ago when we launched the original BeagleBoard, what you could do with ARM devices was not as clear,” says Jason Kridner, Cofounder, BeagleBoard.org. “Especially as the superscalar ARM core was just coming out, people did not know much about what it was really capable of doing. The closest networking appliance out there were things like the Nokia N800-types of devices, but we were really taking a big jump in performance.

“For the industrial  part, the approach was to put this cool technology into people’s hands and get out of the way,” Kridner continues. “It was really just to try to reach that price point so that folks that wanted to go and play with embedded computer software on these networking appliance could go and do that. And it was really an industry changer; you can see all the things that have come since then.”

refer to:
http://embedded-computing.com/articles/diy-pushes-open-hardware-kindergarten-kickstarter/