Back to the future with 8-bit microcontrollers

I’ve been hanging around with the 8-bit crowd lately! Yes, it does still exist, though is now largely restricted to the embedded market. What has surprised me is the level of functionality you can implement with very modest hardware. You can create fully functional web server, email servers and pretty well everything else all with off the shelf 8-bit microcontrollers.

The new breed of 8-bit microcontrollers are particularly good at network enabling older non-networked devices. Whilst I would hesitate to say that it is easy, it is certainly a lot easier and cheaper than it used to be.

Seems odd to think that, here we are seven years into the 21st century and a large minority of the world’s programmers are still writing 8-bit code. 😄