Microcontrollers

There are many types of microcontrollers.
The machines built during the period are fitted with standard Microchip PICs, mostly with the 16F77 pictured here and its smaller sibling the16F628.

I programmed the PICs with a version of the BASIC language, which was great for its ease of use.

I started using microcontrollers with Basic Stamps, then PICs.

Nowadays, I mostly use Arduinos, affordable open source, easy to use boards compatible with MacOS, Windows and Linux, programmed with a variant of the language Processing.