I started out using 6502's in college, graduated to using 8086's for a senior project. Worked as a technician during my co-operative education component of my education, calibrating precision resolvers and sychros used for military navigation. I also did some motor design. When I got out of school, I worked as a temporary contractor designing Fortran software to do data aquisition of running parameters for big inductive motors used in the manufacture of Kevlar yarn. I also had to debug that whole electrical setup because the technicians had wired it wrong. Later I got a job using my 6502 experience, writing software to run industrial robots. I then got my present job, where I also started out using the 6502. Later a project came up where the customer suggested using the Micromint boards, which of course had the 8052 on them. I have since designed my own boards using the 8052, my current favorite derivative is the ADuC834 from Analog Devices. I have used other 8 bit microcontrollers such as the 6805, 68HC11, Z-80, and the 77C82, but I like the 8052 the best and have used it since 1991. I have also been involved in using the 68000 family and of course the 80386, and 80486 family. I also have used the PIC family for some low level designs, in fact I used one recently to do a 30 key, keyboard decoder which used the ADuC834 as the master and the PIC as the slave device.

Jacob