You ainnt kiddin. They have their place. ;) PIC is one I"ve not worked with but back 20 years I wrote code for the single chip 4bitters and they were the same thing and not all that bad. Late adoptor? the first Z80 for me was 1977 (january), NS* running at the astronomical speed of 4mhz. That makes that board 23.8 years old. Caution clue LART in use. I'd have smacked him in the snout with a rolled up Zilog data book, Ca 1976. No, its been there for the last, oh 15 years doing that. Actually the raw Z80 is not seen much in new designs but it's later fellows are very much there. It's one of the most commonly available of the old line CPUs. If the 6800 were still available from Moto (68705 is) it would be used still as is the 6502 decendants. Like PDP-8, PDP11, VAX, Nova, 6502, 6800 and many others a good design is hard to displace. Oh and the CMOS 8085 also went to mars to push rocks around very successfully (mars rover). Allison