A Little Bit of Picstory 

The Microchip PIC was originally manufactured as an NMOS masked device (not an EPROM part) by the Microelectronics Division of the General Instrument Corporation. At some time during the 1980s a second source agreement was made with Plessey Semiconductor in the UK who manufactured these parts under licence. (I have some Plessey PIC1650A parts dated Y8348 indicating they were manufactured in 1983). Plessey developed a CMOS version of the PIC some time later but it never saw the light of day for reasons unknown.

They may possibly have missed a tremendous opportunity for a then British company ?

I also have an original 225 page 'General Instrument PIC Series Microcomputer Data Manual' dated April 1983 which describes routines and applications that could be ported directly to any modern PICs ! The PIC was very popular for use in high volume consumer applications such as washing machines and toys. I could possibly 'scan' this manual and convert it to a pdf file - if anyone is interested then please email me at the address below.

The development system was a very 'clunky' machine called PICES II and the assembler was PICAL-PIC that could be loaded 'into any minicomputer or large scale computer having an editor and FORTRAN IV compiler'. We just don't know how lucky we are today.

Some time ago I met Brian Harden at a PIC seminar and he informed me that he worked with a TTL (Transistor Transistor Logic) breadboard of the PIC and wrote his first program in 1976 !

Update - March 2004: There was a posting by Brian Harden on the Microchip Forums discussion group and he tells the whole story - very interesting !

In June 1992 I published an article in Everyday Electronics describing a Digital Servo Interface allowing model radio control servos to be controlled by ASCII commands from a PC serial port. This was probably the first hobby project in the UK to use a PIC16C54 ! Since then hobbyists seem to use nothing else - what did I start ?