> I still don't know what limits the counter to count binary 000 to 111
> and then restart at 000 does not continuously count up

That puzzled me too. The lower 4 bits of PIR1 are all R/W, but maybe
the problem was actually the port, not PIR1. Although it is probably very
bad practice to use SFRs as general purpose RAM unless you can
really justify it and accept responsibility when it all goes horribly
horribly
wrong, they should work as such. In your case I didn't see anything in
PIR1 that would affect a simple program

What you could be interpreting as restarting may not be so

0000
0001
....
....
0110
0111
1000

If you aren't seeing the "!" on the port you might assume that the counter
has reset. It's the same effect as AND b'00000111'

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