[officialchicken]

I saw these boards all over pratt.edu in the school of architecture in 2005 and later. It was referred to as "wiring board" at the time - no one called it an Arduino, and I just continued to use my STK501 instead.

There were serious issues with the board design and fabrication - the location of the caps were pretty and aligned, but not "smart" for power distribution. Faulty signals, bad timing, and other issues were common with those boards. It was a terrible PCB by any measure (but looked awesome, like 2015 gamer mobos).

However the ideas behind "Wiring" and the "Sketch" were really innovative ideas for non-techs designers who mostly wanted to servo-blinky-sensor artsy stuff. And it really did open up embedded development to a whole new semi-technical audience.