3 ms·
There's another plane on which the analogy fails: the first generation of PC enthusiasts were working with a genuinely new thing. The consumer/hobbyist-grade h
by ajarmst 9y ago
There's another plane on which the analogy fails: the first generation of PC enthusiasts were working with a genuinely new thing. The consumer/hobbyist-grade hardware that the introduction of the 4004/8008/6502 made possible was quite literally impossible only a few years prior. And there was good competition (OK, we Apple ][ folks despised the 'Trash-80', and everyone looked askance when the Commodore 64 with its glitzy marketing toward people who didn't even own soldering irons showed up, but we peripherally recognized each other as factions of the same tribe, and there were options).
Neither of those things is true of the Arduino. I learned how to design simple control systems on Microsequence Controllers ancestral to the AVR more than thirty years ago. And the techniques I learned there still apply to the more sophisticated chips available now. Even the hobbyist platform stuff isn't new. I was wire-wrapping DIP 650*'s into perf-board in the early 1990's, and I built an HC11 model rocket launch controller for my kid the better part of two decades ago. And I know more than a dozen people, not all of them professional engineers, many with only two-year college diplomas who were doing sophisticated hobbyist projects well before the turn of the millennium.
The Arduino isn't analogous to the Apple ][. We had to learn how to program in BASIC and needed to know what a memory map was. It's analogous to Windows 95: a well-engineered product that completely dominates the market, establishes that you don't really need to know anything, and stifles innovation.
- bb611 9y ago> stifles innovation I'm really curious about this - what innovation does Arduino stifle? From my position with some school level dabbling in embedded, it seems like the industry is quite healthy and that there is a lot of innovation happening in terms of hardware outside Arduino, especially on the commercial side of things, where the perception is that Arduino has next to no market share.
- TaylorAlexander 9y agoI disagree. Arduino was new because of the scale of its distribution. I built robots with Basic STAMPs in the early 2000's so I know there were prototyping platforms before, but they never took off in the way that arduino did. And the openness of Arduino was critical to starting my own company, when I built an Arduino compatible board with a fast processor and wireless radio. One could argue computers weren't new - we had vacuum tubes for ages. But it was putting it all together in a certain way (and the associated maturity of certain tech) that led to a step change in what those things meant. For me, arduino similarly created an explosion of hobbyists working with circuits for the first time, and I'm happy that people who know very little have something to work on. But I am sad that the openness has been falling by the wayside.
- s73ver 9y agoI'm sorry, but I fail to see how a product that makes it not just easier, but possible in the first place for people to work with embedded controllers, is "stifling innovation."