I came across Limor's Minty MP3 player when I was young, broke, and looking for an open alternative to an ipod. It was back before Adafruit existed as a web st

I came across Limor's Minty MP3 player when I was young, broke, and looking for an open alternative to an ipod. It was back before Adafruit existed as a web store. Minty was just an open PCB design hosted on a single page with a parts list and a link to a forum where people would help each other source parts and assemble the thing. I have very fond memories of this because it changed the trajectory of my life. It showed me how powerful a tool the internet could be for organizing people around ideas, many of which sought to improve people's lives through free and open technology. The other thing this experience did was to make me feel safe tinkering with hardware and electronic circuits. Consumer devices had felt like mystical black boxes that could never be understood, much less re-created by me. After Minty, I was empowered to take things apart and learn how they worked. I grew an appetite for technical knowledge that hasn't slowed down to this day. EDIT: Found a capture. It's slightly different than I remember it but it's a nice little snapshot of Adafruit's origin story. https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media.mit.edu/~ladyada/make/minty/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20050215023236/http://web.media....