That's an interesting historical note. I only got into microcontrollers because they became available and a co-worker was familiar with them and he had the compiler from his college days. These are working units from active duty so I know they're good (Nortel doesn't buy cheap things either). I like the 8051 cpu because it is a general processor design, as generic and flexible as can be in terms of interrupts, calls, stack, etc. I feel I have full control over what the cpu is doing at any given moment and can do multitasking on my own terms. It has really developed into a hobby on its own. The only thing I wish it had was more RAM. Something like 512 bytes sould have been just fine. That said, even if I could just get some 8752's, I'd be really happy... ;-)