That was an interesting read for various reasons. It wouldn't the first time that the work of a student was taken advantage of by an academic who then presented it as his own. In concept, that Wiring board in the photo has all of the elements of todays Arduino UNO or Mega2560. Its interesting to note that the UNO Serial board retains the male connectors, although these were eventually changed to female connectors.
Its also interesting to read his reason for not choosing PIC ICs. I had wondered why there were no PIC boards based on the Arduino concept. Although I don't know what the Microchip programming software looked like back then, having used MPLAB, it is understandable that this would not be an ideal beginners choice.
Its also understandable that the Parralax MCU was rejected based on cost. I first became aware of it when working with the JTAGulator by Joe Grand and have since become aware of the rather costly Parralax Stamp. The Propeller programming language and IDE are rather different to most traditional programming languages and would likely not have made good beginner learning tool.
That quote from Massimo Banzi at the end does seem rather telling.
"Innovation without asking for permission. So, in a way, Open Source allows you to be innovative without asking for permission."
Open Source allows you to take an existing project and modify it for your own ends, but just because someone made some modificatons and used the work without the consent of the original developper and then claimed the concept as their own, does that equal to innovating? Moreover, just because it might not be illegal, does this make it ethical? It did rather sound like he was trying to justify himself. At the very least, would it not have been a common courtesy to acknowledge the originator of the work, even if they were a student whom you at one time supervised? AFAIK don't most OS licences do actually require some degree of attribution?
I would however like to read up on the other side of the story. There are difficulties with turning a student concept into a viable business proposition including acceptance, funding and having useful contacts. Acceptance of the technology as a concept seems not to have been a problem, but how did the subsequently formed "Arduino Team" actually go about developing the original "Wiring" concept into what is known today as Arduino? And why were they reluctant to acknowledge Herrnando Barragan as the originator of the concept?
Don't suppose you know the name of that compiler?
Blimey, even the early valve based computers like Colossus had paper tape or cards to enter programs. Setting switches sounds laborious and error prone even by those standards. Then again, as I understand it, Nasa often stuck with the tried and tested rather than going for bleeding edge (for the time) for reliability reasons.
I found wiring.org.co, but an attempt to download the Linux version of Wiring results in a 404 error. The link to the Hardware and the Wiki is broken as is the link to the forum. I did also find a Github though.
https://github.com/WiringProject/Wiring/
It has not been updated for 15 years.
Wanted to have a look on Linux but unfortunately it requires me to install snap which is a Ubuntu thing that I don't really want to install. Had a quick look at it on Windows in a virtual machine. One can't help deny its similarity with Arduino IDE v1.x, just that it doesn't have the board management bits.
