[analog31]

I spent many years with PIC chips, starting with PIC16C84 and a homemade EEPROM programmer on my DOS machine. One thing I like to this day is that the PIC chips were extremely well documented, and the documentation style was consistent across their product line. This in turn made bare-iron programming relatively easy.

[eggy]

I still have my UV EPROM eraser from those days. My friend used an old chip of mine with the brass frame around the quartz window as a base for jewelry design. They do look cool on their own!

[analog31]

I kept a few of those chips to show my kids. They're really works of art.

The PIC16C84 was one of the (if not the) first MCU chips to use EEPROM (precursor to flash memory), so I didn't need an eraser. It became a favorite of hobbyists. Programs were so simple, that assembly language wasn't really much of a barrier. I only started using C later, in fact, to teach myself C programming.

Before that, I made a board that combined an 8031 (8051 without built-in ROM) and a 28 pin EEPROM. My programmers hung on the parallel printer port of a MS-DOS machine, and were controlled by code I wrote in Turbo Pascal. Ah, the days. ;-)

[SV_BubbleTime]

I missed the UV boat, but instead of getting a high voltage programmer like I should have, wasted a ton of time saving $100 by making an low voltage programmer that sometimes worked. Embedded was rough for a long time.