Note that Adam Dunkels, who wrote this writeup and posted it here, is one of the most accomplished embedded programmers in the world; if you've done TCP/IP on a computer without an OS in the last ten years, you probably used his lwIP stack. What you might not know is that lwIP was originally written for his free-software operating system Contiki, which can run working web browsers not only on a Commodore 64 but even a Commodore PET.

A city-sized IPv6 mesh network built out of handheld-sized devices was science fiction 25 years ago. Metricom's Ricochet showed it was possible, without the IPv6, about 23 years ago. And after decades of resistance and sandbagging from regulators, Thingsquare is finally making it happen in real life.