Less than 24 hours ago, I wrote:

> Greetings all!  I was an electronics hobbyist back in the late '70s
> and early '80s but have been pretty much a software guy since then.  A
> few weeks back I stumbled onto the SX and was shocked that nowadays a
> 50 MIPS microcontroller can be had for five bucks.  I immediately went
> out and popped for the SX-tech tool kit.  It should be arriving any
> day now.
> 
> In the meantime, I've been researching other microcontrollers, mostly
> the Microchip PIC.  [ ... ]

First off, many *many* thanks to everyone who responded.  I don't
think I have *ever* gotten so many in-depth replies in such a short
time before!  You have filled in all the missing pieces for me!

In some sense, a funny story from my childhood has repeated itself.
My interest in electronics started when I was in the third grade,
circa 1976 and my only source of information was the elementary school
library.  The electronics section contained some 20 books, most of
which were donated by a single person.  They were all written between
the late '40s and early '60s.  In some of the books, the only
semi-conductor was the cat's whisker.  Some others contained
information about diodes and transistors in the conclusing chapters.
I specifically remember the following line from one of the books, "If
you are fortunate enough to be able to obtain a transistor, here is a
circuit you can build."  As you can imagine, I was quite confused when
I walked into Radio Shack and a mixed lot of of a dozen transistors
was two bucks and the cheapest vacuum tube was $10 and they went up in
price from there!  A few months later I got one of the 150-in-1
project kits (how many of y'all still have yours?) but it was probably
a good year or more before before I realized the humor of the
situation.

The same thing has now been repeated with the PIC 16C84 -- much more
capable devices are now available at lower prices.  I had a notion of
this, but the full extent only just became apparent.  I also only just
realized that what made this chip so popular was that it was the only
inexpensive chip to have EEPROM memory, while nearly everything these
days uses flash memory.

But back to the issue of programming...

In summary, there is absolutely no need for a fancy programmer, yet at
the same time bit banging on the parallel port really isn't worthwhile
for anything but bootstrapping your first PIC.  In my mind, the
optimal programmer for the hobbyist is a PIC driven by serial control,
such as the Wisp628.

However, after researching ICD2 clones (as someone suggested) I
discovered the Olimex ICD2 clone which can both program and debug
PICs, interfaces directly with MPLAB, and has both serial and USB
interfaces.  At $90 assembled and tested, this isn't substantially
more than the Wisp, not to mention that it provides debugging which
I'll probably want anyhow.  This seems like a real no-brainer, and In
retrospect, this is what I probably should have purchased instead of
the Ubicom SX toolkit to get started with.  As it is, my
microcontroller toolbox will merely be filling up faster than I had
initially intended.  ;-)

Does anyone have any experience with the Olimex ICD2?  Are there any
other ICD2 clones worth considering?  Any other comments before I just
go out and order one?  ;-)

-p.
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