Wow are you guys dragging up memories!!!

The 1650 was the first commercially available PIC and the -xxx series
denoted one with a particular program that was used for some purpose.
The -532 strikes a chord, but I can't remember what it did.

The AY8910 was the world's first digital sound generator. It had three
channels and was developed when us folks working on the video game chip set
decided that viewers were also listeners. My reason (believe it or not) for
recommending three channels was that I was working on a racing game that had
two side by side tracks and I needed a channel for each track and another
for miscellaneous effects. It was followed by a much improved AY8930 but by
that time the game was over. By the way, the silicon designer I worked with
on the 8930 is now the editor in chief of an important magazine in our
industry.

The SP0256 was a very neat second generation speech processor that had
on-board rom for holding a compressed form of bits that were decoded into
the excitation parameters and filter coefficient for the "model of the vocal
tract". We did several pre-programmed versions including the -AL2 which
contained an allaphone set that could be used to construct rather robotic
sounding speech and a few sound effects.

The PICAL was indeed a fortran-based assembler which produced some wonderful
relocatable code in a form that predates but has a lot of the philosphical
features of the COFF format of compiler output. The reason for the fortran
base was the available machines at the time were main frames. Later (again
believe it or not) my team did an assembler written in basic (PICALB) for
the same reason -- The Apple machines were the only personal computers in
large circulation and their native code was Basic. Another historical
note -- when Apple sent us the code for the Basic Interpreter in the Apple
II, the author's name was in the first few lines of comments -- Steve
Wozniak.

The PICES was this large metal box that successfully emulated the PIC series
and was written using the same fortan-based assembler. We wanted to call it
an "ICE", but the name was already trademarked.

Sorry for the nostalgia trip and other worthless trivia. The tools, the
parts and the techniques we have now make our job so much easier. But the
biggest factor, of course, is the raw talent typified by this list that can
really put all this together into great products!

Tom

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