I think it will be interesting to find out which product used ESP8266 based ESP-01 and -12E modules for their original intended purposes before it was “found”. They were meant to be low performance UART/SPI/I2C/SDIO... compatible “modem” to cheaply add Wi-Fi to some other product, probably some tablets or IoT home hub or appliance device.
They were already mass produced and available as factory leak/direct sale/replacement parts at dimes apiece, then were picked up by the guy who ported Arduino Core to it when he was looking for anything small and cheap that has Wi-Fi and are reprogrammable.
It could have been some Sierra Wireless UMTS or Intel Wi-Fi bgn or CSR Bluetooth, but the easiest he could tap onto was an 8266. I remember there was a guy showing demo doing what today one would do with M5Stack done on a classic miniPCI card in Maker Faire Tokyo like a decade ago, except notably the logo on the guy’s badge and laser etching on the chip kind of looked similar so that kind of future could have been possible but never materialized. Similarly I still have couple “Zero Channel RAID” cards somewhere that I dreamed of turning them into what Raspberry Pi is today. So a lot of these opportunities exist/ed but are/were neglected for the lack of interest to get over a chasm. Perhaps modern day equivalents to them are DRAM cached SSDs, some of them smell like penguins.
They were already mass produced and available as factory leak/direct sale/replacement parts at dimes apiece, then were picked up by the guy who ported Arduino Core to it when he was looking for anything small and cheap that has Wi-Fi and are reprogrammable.
It could have been some Sierra Wireless UMTS or Intel Wi-Fi bgn or CSR Bluetooth, but the easiest he could tap onto was an 8266. I remember there was a guy showing demo doing what today one would do with M5Stack done on a classic miniPCI card in Maker Faire Tokyo like a decade ago, except notably the logo on the guy’s badge and laser etching on the chip kind of looked similar so that kind of future could have been possible but never materialized. Similarly I still have couple “Zero Channel RAID” cards somewhere that I dreamed of turning them into what Raspberry Pi is today. So a lot of these opportunities exist/ed but are/were neglected for the lack of interest to get over a chasm. Perhaps modern day equivalents to them are DRAM cached SSDs, some of them smell like penguins.