Claim: NodeMCU was created shortly after the ESP8266 came out, Espressif Systems began production of the ESP8266 in 2013 but the project only worked on software.
Evidence: NodeMCU is an open source firmware for which open source prototyping board designs are available. 
NodeMCU started on 13 Oct 2014, when Hong committed the first file of nodemcu-firmware to GitHub.