Excellent,

Thanks for all the replies. Of course, now I have a lot more reading/research to do, but that's part of what attracts me to this technology. I should be making my purchase within the next few weeks (read: as soon as the wife lets me), and I already am feeling more confident about my eventual decision.

As for those "loosely defined reqs", well, the problem is the only reason I want to program '51s is just to program them! I have no career or commercial goals regarding hardware, and I can't think of any reason why I need an 8051, but I find myself attracted to the challenges of embedded programming. This is why I believe the dev board choice is such a serious decision, as while I fully believe I'll get years worth of service from it, my projects and code will probably never evolve beyond that system.

Thanks again,
Dave