On Jun 24, 2004, at 7:09 AM, Spehro Pefhany wrote:

> Microchip produced extremely cheap usable development hardware and
> free software (at the time assemblers could cost hundreds of dollars).'

Don't forget parallax.  They were selling PICs in 1s to hobbyists back
when the only other microcontrollers you could get (as a hobbyist) were
$30 8051s.  It probably didn't hurt that their "basic stamp" was based
on a PIC as well.  It seemed to me like a lot of people grew from the
stamp into PICs in general...

Nowdays...  Microchip and Atmel are still pretty much duking it out for
design wins in the 'simple and robust microcontroller' arena.  Most of
the competitors don't do anywhere NEAR the ~20mA output drive of the
AVRs and PICs.  Which can be a PITA...

BillW

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