Bob Paddock wrote: > > The PIC gained a foothold due to Motorola, not Hobbyists. > At the time most embedded designs were moving to the 6805 family > for the low end (small pin count) chips. Then Motorola said > "Sorry guys. Detroit bought *all of them* for the foreseeable > future." The PIC was the only real option at the time, outside > of the Zilog Z8; 8048 & 8051 had not yet moved to small > pin counts. If it was not for that move by Motorola the > world would be a very different place today.
I doubt it, the audience of these two devices is quite different. The 6805 family could address 64K external RAM/ROM/IO. The PIC has no such capability. The original PIC's had 64-128 words of program ROM on board, and something like 32 bytes of RAM. They could not address external RAM, ROM, or IO devices. > I have an original PIC data book from General Instruments here, > and if you read that today, you'd wonder why anyone would > want to design in this part intended to run a Washing Machine. Because they have a "Washing Machine" sized job? There are thousands of tasks that are marginally too big for a PAL, and too small for a general purpose microprocessor. The PIC is for those jobs. > The PIC18, other than the RAM bank switching, is not that bad. True. > Don't write off the dsPIC/PIC24, those are good parts, more like > the 68000. Also the PIC32 is based on MISP, so even Microchip > has learned their lesson. I cannot imagine what lesson they needed to learn. They made a line of extremely easy to use microprocessors that are about as cheap as the package they come in. I should be so smart as they. -Chuck Harris _______________________________________________ time-nuts mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe, go to https://www.febo.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/time-nuts and follow the instructions there.
