This is my personal version of the history of the PIC.

In the mid seventies I was working for the semiconductor manufacturer, General Instrument Microelectronics, in their Glenrothes factory (in Fife, Scotland). At that time GIM had a very successful 16-bit microprocessor called the CP1600. It had been designed in Hicksville, New York, in collaboration with Honeywell and was a truly amazing chip for its time. (It was designed into high end games consoles of the day and sold in quantities approaching a million a year.)

Being a microprocessor it needed peripherals around it to make it do anything useful and the design guys came up with a novel peripheral interface chip that would help the system with that function. It was to be a programmable device (mask programmable in those days) that could easily manipulate its pins in order to do useful things. They built two TTL prototypes of this chip and sent us one to evaluate. I was working on a teletext chip set at the time and I needed a controller to perform the user interface. I managed to make the huge pile of TTL do the function very nicely and we quickly saw the device as potentially very flexible for any control task.

They kept the initials of peripheral interface chip but changed it to mean programmable intelligent computer, or PIC, and the single-chip microcontroller was born. That first program was written early in 1976 and it was made into the teletext controller chip. It was an NMOS device, with 512 instructions, 40 pins and 32 I/O. It was known as the PIC1650 and the core was almost identical to the low-end PICs of today.

Over the next couple of years, while working for GI, I wrote several programs for the device that became real products. Since it was clearly a wonderful device, when I moved on in 1981 I took the product with me. By this time GI had designed a couple of other versions, a smaller PIC1654 and one with 1K of memory, the PIC1670.

I started a design consultancy business based primarily on applications using the PIC and one of my best projects was the worldâ?™s second all-electronic washing machine (the first was rubbish!). This was the Micron launched by Creda in 1983 and used the â?™54 for motor speed control and the â?™70 for user interface and machine control. Ours lasted for 18 years and to this day I do not believe it has been bettered. Even the Dyson washing machine, the CR01, does not have some of the clever features of the Micron, although it, too, is controlled by a PIC (a PIC16F877).

Building on the success of designing the PIC into domestic appliances I ran the design consultancy to 1998. We designed a vast range of different products throughout that time but three-quarters of them used a PIC.

The device changed a bit over that period, of course. GI started to design a CMOS version just as the parent company got into financial difficulties. Plessey Semiconductors picked the thing up in a second sourcing deal and nearly finished a very good version of a CMOS PIC, but it never quite happened. Eventually the General Instrument Corporation sold off the microelectronics group to a management buy-out. The Glenrothes and Hicksville sites were closed down and the company consolidated into its main factory in Chandler, Arizona. Microchip was born.

Building on the perceived future of the microcontroller and GIâ?™s expertise in EPROM technology the device was redesigned as a field-programmable CMOS device. The concept worked brilliantly and within ten years Microchip rose to become the worldâ?™s second biggest supplier of 8-bit single chip microcontrollers. Recently, of course, they made it to number one! I have been privileged to work with the manufacturers of the PIC over the years (both GI and Microchip), I know many of the guys there very well indeed and have contributed to the business by making positive comments from the userâ?™s point of view.

Microchipâ?™s RISC-based PIC microcontrollers are designed for applications requiring high performance and low cost. The portfolio now consists of nearly 200 products in five families and features a variety of memory configurations, low voltage and power, small footprint and ease-of-use. As well as being simplicity itself to use the devices are robust enough for the most demanding applications and both the code and chip pinouts allow easy migration up and down the product range. Technology, too, has moved on and many of the parts now have flash memory which allows total flexibility of device programming and reprogramming, on and off board.

I wrote my first PIC program in 1976 and have used the part in one form or other almost continuously ever since. While I have concentrated on applications in high volume consumer products, the range of products I have designed is so varied that I can honestly say that whatever you want I have probably designed something like it.

Да не излезе, че преди ТТЛ версията е имало PIC от дискретни транзистори, преди това лампов, преди него електромеханичен с релета и перфокарти, а преди това чисто механичен. Разбира се, всичко започва от легендарния прото-PIC-16 (от 16-ти век) проектиран от Леонардо да Винчи и Блез Паскал, които обаче са ползвали късносредновековен препис на древни асирийски схеми и чертежи.

Да не излезе, че се движи по еволюционната линия на хлебарките - възникнал преди динозаврите и не е еволюирал до сега нито крачка