Where did the idea for Tendril come from?
Enwall: The initial spark of the idea came from my background at Apple and by drawing an analog to personal computers. In the mid-70s the concept of one processor for each person on the planet was forming — at places like Apple, Apollo, Radio Shack, Commodore and elsewhere. That processing engine had a layer of system software — today known as an operating system — that enabled a huge variety of different, vertical-specific applications to be built. Games, spreadsheets, accounting packages, graphic design — a huge host of applications. Today, we have hundreds of microcontrollers that are, essentially, invisible all around us. These microcontrollers are largely NOT networked today. With the advent of cheap radios and, finally, low-power networking algorithms to move packets around, we can finally begin to network the $2 microcontroller in a massive way. That processing engine (the network of hundreds of microcontrollers) needs a layer of system software so that myriad applications c
