Re: [PIC]: Happy New PICList Year

On Wed, December 31, 2025 1:14 pm, Bob Blick wrote:
> On December 1, 1994 the PICList was started at Massachusetts Institute of
> Technology. It was running on Majordomo. I remember when we switched to
> Mailman, but I forget whan that was. Probably 1999.
>
>
> I thank the users, admins, and MIT for making the PICList what it is
> today.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
>
> Bob

Not sure when I joined the piclist, but I started using PICs in 1995,
moving over from the MC68705 and the MC6802. Back then, the chips were in
ceramic packages with a quartz window so the EPROM could be erased. I also
had a big expensive emulator with different modules to emulate different
chips. Then came the OTP chips, which were the EPROM chips in plastic
packages that could not be erased, but once the firmware was stable, they
were a good inexpensive production part. Somewhere along the the line came
the in circuit debugger which really decreased costs. Then flash memory so
we could do field firmware updates.

Microchip started with the General Instruments architectures. I think they
were in the PIC16. The PIC18 expanded upon that. I don't know the origin
of the PIC24, but I'm still supporting a product with the PIC24H256GP610.
Then the PIC32MX with the MIPS architecture. I'm currently doing a hobby
project with the PIC32MZ ( https://w6iwi.org/rtty/DspTU3/ ). It looks like
MIPS ( https://mips.com ) has abandoned the MIPS architecture and gone
with RISC-V.  I see microchip now provides chips with the 8 bit PIC core,
8 bit AVR, 8051, ARM Cortex, MIPS, 32 bit AVR, dsPIC (similar to the
PIC24, as I recall), PIC32A, and PIC24.


Earlier this year, James Newton let the piclist.com server go away. He has
started migrating some stuff to github. Before the server went away, he
let me archive it at https://pic.hallikainen.org/ . I've since migrated
servers, so the search engine there does not work. I'll try to update that
soon. Also, piclist.com had a bunch of code generators that do not work on
the archived site. SOME DAY, I'll see if I can migrate the scripts to
something supported by Alma Linux (probably PHP).

Harold



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