I have to agree somehow with Craig. As I am a student I can see things from a student's point of view. You can learn many things by the basics, such as an 8255 chip (yes, I have programmed an 8255 in the new millennium ;). Obsolete parts such as a Z80, an original 8031/8051, 8255, etc, can be really useful for understanding how digital electronics work. For example, in my case I understood many things about microprocessors in general when I was taught about the Z80 CPU.

And at this point I would like to emphasize, and suggest Mr Gary Burt at the same time, the importance of a very useful tool, that no one mentioned: The Simulator. It is a very important tool for learning and understanding things. Later on, you can continue with a real microcomputing system, such as a development board, for some simple projects (matrix keyboards, text LCDs, etc).



Here is the problem. Do our teachers comment on that? Which is, do they say to us, the students, "You may thing that this processor/equipment is obsolete, but BE careful: Modern alternatives DO exist!". This is very important for newbies, especially when they read every single day about Pentium X 1024bit CPUs, with clocks at 10GHz , and 128MB cache, etc, etc, etc... Even more they forgot to say that you don't need a modern CPU to design a burglar alarm system, but even a 8bit micro can do the work. And finally, what the heck is embedded designing? Why do I have to learn about 8bitters? Several similar questions can follow from us, the newbies/students...

I am not implying that this happens in the academic community in all over the world, but this was my case, or at least this is the way I see things...

George