I have been unable to get a job opportunity in the BayArea. Some consultants have told me that 8051 is now becoming obsolete and that I should learn something new.
Of course it is. There are myriads of people making megabyte embedded systems that seems to work and then there are all us obsoletes that make nifty little thiung that actually work. The '51 is, indeed, becoming obsolete in the shops where engineers are too lazy to make the effort to make do with what it takes to make a competitive product. I have devekoped products selling in the 10.000s, 100.000s and 10s based on the '51. Currently I am using ~2000 '51s a month and have no intention of leaving the basic architecture but am, for every new development, looking at the wonderful new derivatives.

From another point of view, Philips have, in the last few years, introduced more than 20 new derivatives of this obsolete architecture and others have introduced new derivatives as well.

Erik