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> tou can blink LEDs with an 5$ Arduino/ESP32 too.

At the time the RPi came out I don't believe Wi-Fi-enabled microcontrollers were a thing or were as widespread. RPi was the OG low-cost, popular Wi-Fi "microcontroller".

You are right that nowadays a lot of that can easily be done on an ESP32.

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Raspberry pi didn't have built in WiFi until raspberry pi 3 in 2016 (of course you could use a usb adapter). I think around similar time esp 8266 (cheap microcontroller with WiFi) started becoming popular

There were some NRF boards with Wifi IIRC, but Raspi just worked and you could just use Python to do whatever you needed with GPIO instead of messing about with the kinda-sorta C but not quite.

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