IIRC, PIC appealed to those embedded/EE guys because it was simple. It was also really cheap. You could add a tiny bit of smarts to your design for a little b

IIRC, PIC appealed to those embedded/EE guys because it was simple. It was also really cheap. You could add a tiny bit of smarts to your design for a little bit of money and effort. Those guys became well-versed in the PIC weirdness and stuck with it even though other, more traditional(i.e. 8051 based) micros came out with good features at nice price points. I don't remember a lot of cheap, easy to use options based on ARM around the time that the first PICs came out. Honestly I'm not sure though. I skipped the PIC entirely. I dealt with Z8's and 68HC12s at the time(and TMS320s, but that's another story).