In his defence, most people starting with tinkering nowadays start off with something like an Arduino (8-bit or even 32-bit micro) and there's not much besides

In his defence, most people starting with tinkering nowadays start off with something like an Arduino (8-bit or even 32-bit micro) and there's not much besides the micro on those boards... which easily explains the confusion about the nomenclature, mixing up the subset (µC) with the superset (IC).