Good call on Arduino. The ability to write LED blinky embedded software on a microcontroller using a simple IDE and a USB cable was definitely 10x from what came before. The barriers to entry in terms of knowledge, tools (compilers), and dev boards was immense before Arduino.
You mean getting a oscillator, caps, breadboard, MCU, avr-gcc, and a JTAG interface was too much work to get a LED to blink? :)
Arduino changed the game, wish I had it in college. Honorable mention to Microchip's PIC line - they had a arduino like kit that made a lot of those things easier too.
came to say Arduino; I cut my teeth on Basic Stamps in school but today they still cost over $150 just to get all the hardware you need to started. And forget about leaving just the brains in a home monitoring gadget or clock project, they cost over $50 each!
Arduino MCUs can literally be removed from the developer board and function stand-alone with a few cents of external hardware, and the chip itself can be replaced with a blank for a few dollars.
