Ha, coincidentally, I designed and built an 8051-based MIDI switch in the early 90’s. There weren’t that many good tools at the time, and I designed everything

Ha, coincidentally, I designed and built an 8051-based MIDI switch in the early 90’s. There weren’t that many good tools at the time, and I designed everything from the software and UI to the circuit board and rack-mount case. I even wrote an 8051 assembler in C, but found a good tiny-C compiler for it before it went into production. You are not a programmer unless you’ve written key-debounce code :) (OTOH, some of the worst programmers I’ve ever had the displeasure of working with were amazing low-level code hackers. In olden times, it seems like you were either good at that level of abstraction, or you were good at a much different [“higher”] level, seldom both.)