In this topic we introduce the pic16F84 mcu

This first Personal Computer (PC) spawned a generation of computer hackers. Thus an unknown 19-year-old Harvard computer science student, Bill Gates, and a visiting friend, Paul Allen, in December 1975 noticed a picture of the Altair9 on the front cover of Popular Electronics and decided to write software for this primordial PC. They called Ed Robert with a bluff, telling him that they had just about finished a version of the BASIC programming language that would run on the Altair. Thus was the Microsoft Corporation born.
In a parallel development, 22 Altair owners in San Francisco set up the Home-brew club. Two members were Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. As a club demonstration, they built a PC which they called the Apple.10 By 1978 the Apple II made $700,000; in 1979 sales were $7 million, and then $48 million.
The Apple II was based around the low-cost 6502 MPU which was produced by a company called MOS Technology. It was designed by Chuck Peddle, who was also responsible for the 6800 MPU, and had subsequently left Motorola. The 6502 bore an uncanny resemblance to the Motorola 6800 family and indeed Motorola sued to prevent the related 6501 MPU being sold, as it even had the same pinout as the 6800. The 6502 was one of the main players in PC hardware by the end of the 1970s, being the computing engine of the BBC series and Commodore PETs amongst many others.
What really powered up Apple II sales was the VisiCalc spreadsheet package. When the business community discovered that the PC was not just a toy, but could do ‘real’ tasks, sales took off. The same thing happened to the IBM PC. Reluctantly introduced by IBM in 1981, the PC was powered by an Intel 8088 MPU clocked at 4.77 MHz together with 128 Kbyte of RAM, a twin 360 Kbyte disk drive and a monochrome text-only VDU. The operating system was Microsoft’s PC/MS-DOS version 1.0. The spreadsheet package here was Lotus 1-2-3.
By the end of the 1970s the technology of silicon VLSI fabrication had progressed to the stage that several tens of thousands transistors could be integrated on the one chip. Microprocessor designers were quick to exploit this capability in one of two ways. The better known of these was to increase the size of the ALU and buses/memory capacity. Intel were the first with the 29,000-transistor 8086, introduced in 1978 as a 16-bit version of the 8085 MPU.11 It was designed to be compatible with its eight-bit predecessor in both hardware and software aspects. This was wise commercially, in order to keep the 8085′s extensive customer base from looking at competitor products, but technically dubious. It was such previous experience that led IBM to use the 8088 version, which had a reduced eight-bit data bus and 20-bit address bus12 to save board space.