My first 8051 development was in 1980 - it was a kids daisy wheel typrewriter. That was when I discovered that mask exchange agreements are not quite what you would expect. Next I did a cordless phone based on the RCA 1802 - that was fun - a micro with no call instruction. I think we had 8K EPROM in that and perhaps 256bytes of RAM. Then, for my sins, I developed the 6809 based Dragon 32 home computer, followed by another 6809 based design - this time an optical database. Soon after I moved into management but I still did a lot of work sorting out problems in other people's designs. In 1987 a bunch of us set up on our own and we did a complete range of hand held label printers over a 10 year period. These used mainly Hitachi and latterly Samsung single chip 8 bitters. I think the most sophisticated of these had 1K RAM. That was also the first and last one we coded in C. The compiler was simply dreadfull and we had to do all sorts of hand optimisations. We also got into DAB on TI DSP devices, CO detectors on Z8s and later PICs. Just before I retired we did do a couple of developments, a set top box and a GSM system monitor, both of which I think ran embedded Linux but these were 32 bit processors.

Ian