The Simplicity of Wirth

The PICs that Wirth wrote about in 2008 would have qualified as “retrocomputing” at the time. The 16C84 was already 15 years old when he was using them. While the aims are different, Hernando Barragán’s Wiring (which got co-opted/nicked, mostly uncredited, by the Arduino crew) had been using ATmega chips for teaching interaction design since 2004. Wirth’s choice of such comparatively ancient…