From a historical viewpoint has being able to do over the wire/air firmware updates been a feature of embedded devices forever, or only something that appeared in the last 15 years or so?
I'm thinking of those devices that are smart enough to 'phone home', query to see if an update is available, download it and reprogram itself, rather than relatively dumb devices that have to be forced into a special bootloader/update state by a parent device that pushes the update.