At 08:45 AM 6/25/2004 -0400, you wrote:
>On Thu, Jun 24, 2004 at 10:21:09PM -0700, William Chops Westfield wrote:
> > 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.

Parallax with their MCS-51 type assembler was a factor in the hobbyist market,
and small business too, I suspect. I never dealt with them. I'm not sure
about the educational market. Motorola seemed to have a good handle into
that because their architecture wasn't nearly as ugly.

>That's not exactly how I remember it Bill. 8031s were available in the
>$2 to $3 range.

An 8031 is a microprocessor, not a microcontroller, at least by my definition.
Some would argue with that, but it's also the definition Microchip uses for
their units that have both modes.

>But it required infrastructure to use, You had to add
>EPROM, RAM, address latches and input and output just to get a basic system
>going.

External RAM is not required- there's more built into the 8031 than in many
PICs (128 x 8 for the 8031 and 256 x 8 in the 8032). The one external latch
chip
was usually used but there were also some (unpopular) EPROM chips with the
address latch built-in. Similarly, there's a bit of I/O.

>  Same with the others. One of the last non PIC systems I built was based
>on a 68340. Same deal, RAM and EPROM were required to get it going. You then
>had to work on a bootloader for development.
>
> >  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...
>
>Yup.

I think their PIC development stuff preceded the "Basic Stamp" by some
time (years?).

 > 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...
>
>Another point is that the parts still work at 5V. The TI MPS430 is excellent
>and inexpensive. But it's 3.3V only and IIRC only comes in surface mount
>packages.

The supply voltage range (1.8-3.6V) and the package are not really issues for
non-hobbyists (often they are advantages), but the lack of 5V-tolerant I/O
causes complexities to arise in system design.

Best regards,

Spehro Pefhany --"it's the network..."            "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

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