Hi,
 I've been doing the odd simple bit of electronics stuff much of my life (I
do mean *simple*- only complicated things I've done have been kits), but I'=
ve
generally found much of it quite hard to understand. Recently though my
curiosity and compulsion to design/make stuff has been outweighing that, and
I've been teaching myself more and more, but I've also particularly been
interested in playing with PIC chips, and want to order a bunch when I
order various other components soon.

 Unfortunately, however much I read on the net (including various datasheets
and large chunks of the PICList site), I'm still fairly unsure about certain
things, and it's making me stall:

-The different families of processors, EG- PIC10, PIC12, PIC14, and so on:
what is the difference? I note that there's different instructions between
different chips, and I get the impression that the "12" and "14" etc refer
to the instruction word size (but inconsistently?), but would it be
accurate to say for instance, that each member of any given family has the
exact same set of instructions? Any other inter-family differences? Part
of why I'm confused might be the datasheet that described the 12F50Xes
along with the 16F505, which seemed to imply a connection.

-I understand that the "C" parts are OTP and the "F" parts are Flash/EEPROM,
and obviously the latter is good because you get to reprogram them. I'd been
under the impression that the advantage of the OTP parts was that they're
cheaper and therefore good for products- but when I look at prices of
the C and F versions of the same chip, the *F* parts seem to be consistently
cheaper! Is there some *other* reason to use the C versions, or is this some
sort of fluke? Maybe they have other differences?

-Lots of the chips seem to be programmable by "ICSP", which I've been readi=
ng
up on. But it seems to be implied that there's *other* (more conventional?)
means to process them, that differ by more than whether or not the chips are
already in a circuit. But apart from "LVP" for a couple of models, I've not
been able to find out how else they'd be programmed: the generic simple
parallel-port programmers for the -84 devices appears to be using something
much like ICSP too, and I've seen few other circuits.

-For that matter, what apart from the pinout and VPP voltage differs between
parts such that programmers are compatible with some and not others?

( Several of these questions might make a bit more sense if I point out tha=
t:
-I'm a penny-pinching skinflint, and don't much like the idea of spending
=A320 or more on a programmer that I could maybe make for much less, especi=
ally
if the =A320 one doesn't support all the chips I want to use, and
-Because of my stinginess, and the fact I want to buy quite a lot of PICs,
those PIC10 and PIC12 chips are really appealing to me- but those seem to
be less supported by programmers :P )

I expect I've forgotten a few questions, but that sounds like more than
enough already!

Many thanks in advance,
 Tom Barnes-Lawrence
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