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While a Raspberry Pi isn't a strict requirement for web scraping, it provides a convenient environment since it comes with Python and many necessary libraries pre-installed. For those who may not have a Raspberry Pi, downloading Python 3 and the required libraries on any other computer will suffice.

A Brief History of Web Scraping

Web scraping techniques have evolved since the inception of the World Wide Web. The journey began with Tim Berners-Lee's creation of the web in 1989, which was foundational for automated data gathering. In 1993, Matthew Gray developed the Wanderer program at MIT—a tool that indexed the web pages based on HTML metadata and laid the groundwork for modern web crawling.