Found some official logos , banners and (c)opyright marks dating to 2012. Curious if this was the start of Arduino, and they never removed it...
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Arduino started in about 2005.
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https://blog.arduino.cc/2021/12/09/one-board-to-rule-them-all-history-of-the-arduino-uno/
What is very hazy, is how or when I first stumbled on Arduino.
It certainly had nothing to do with school (still valves), FE or employment. No WWW.
It must have been a purely chance thing, though I had already dabbled with PLCs and automation.
Of course there was no formal coding taught throughout, which is probably why I still struggle. The only language I learned, self taught, was Fortran
My first book was Practical Arduino by Jonathan Oxer, followed by Arduino Cookbook.
Certainly, Arduino has turned out to be absorbing and entertaining.
Hi @xfpd. If you are interested in the arcana of the early days of Arduino, a good place for archaeology is the revision history of the Arduino IDE 1.x Git repository.
For example, here you can see the Arduino IDE 1.x codebase as it was at the time of the "0002" release, over 20 years ago:
For the first years of the project, the software was quite monolithic, with the core, libraries, and examples all being developed as part of the Arduino IDE repository. So even if you are more interested in the firmware side of things than tooling, this revision history still contains a lot of relevant information.
As far as i know all older IDE versions are still available for download. (on the official website) I still have rev 00023 installed (though no longer used)
The files are still on the download server, but the "Previous IDE Releases" page that used to be present on the Arduino website was removed last summer. Fortunately we can still see it on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20250727111955/https://www.arduino.cc/en/software/OldSoftwareReleases
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Am interesting find nonetheless. The revisions.txt document shows 22 revisions, with this being revision 0022 released on 2010.12.24. Its curious that the banner still shows 'alpha'.
One of the URLs in that file is http://code.google.com/arduino. That still has a download to version 0012 here:
(BTW, the site is https encrypted now!)
There is no releases.txt file, but the 'Guide RecentChanges.html' file in the HTML manual lists changes between 2006 and 2007.
Unfortunately the version from cwbp.net is 32-bit and needs a 32-bit Java to run. Although one can still find a 32-bit Linux distro, all the major VM tools dropped support for 32-bit some years back so it can't really be run unless you happen to still have an old computer with a 32-bit OS on it. However, that Google repository has a 64-bit version of 0022 and 0018. I was able to run although not compile with these. Here is a screenshot from version 0018:
There is no support for the UNO yet but it does the Nano 328, Diecimila, Duemilanove and Mega. Instead of Sketch->Upload and Sketch->Upload Using Programmer it has File->Upload to IO Board which I presume served the same purpose as the current USB upload method?
Didn't realise that it was possible to go back as far as version 0002 on Github though.
My installed rev 0023 compiles all (i think it was the last before v1) and has a few boards included
Also the upload button was just in a slightly different location
It looks like about 6 years there was also an IDE originally called Arduino IDE Pro? It had toggle switch to turn Pro mode on and off and some interesting additions to the menu. There also appears to have been an early attempt at Git integration.
It seems this eventually morphed into what we now call IDE 2.x and some of the features are available through the Ctrl-Shift-P menu, but the Git integration didn't make it?