Lectron System, the Arduino Precursor

I don't remember snap circuits when I was a kid, it was all about the spring terminal kits.

I didn't really get anywhere with any of it until I started doing microcontrollers though. I don't think I really made an effort to really learn and improve in the analog era, I followed along with instructions but never did anything nontrivial on my own

Occasionally things just didn't work, pretty sure broken components or bad connections or some other dumb trivial problem was happening, so I kind of got a sense that these analog parts were mysterious unknowable things.

I think I would have probably learned more if I'd had the Falstad simulator or something.

With microcontrollers, the path forward is much clearer, once you know the basics of coding and how to use libraries, whatever idea you have seems possible, and it's more obvious what the next step is and what you should be learning.

With analog work it's all like doing math, everything interacts in ten different ways, and the application itself is one side of an equation you sometimes have to change to make it all work.

Growing up watching tech in the movies, you almost never see anything that's possible without microcontrollers. You have to be really smart to even come up with any ideas that you can do with analog.