On a sunny day (Wed, 07 Mar 2012 00:14:29 +1100) it happened Chris Baird wrote in :
That is bull. Parports were common in those days,
There are very few PICless people posting here. the small PICs should be programmed in asm (16F84 was very popular). Kids did it all the time.
There are some who cannot program and nveer will learn, those run things like eclipse and java today and are responsible for the slow bloat of the world. They look down on teh littel cute micros. Learn to work with the tools you have, the 8051 was Harvard too, found in almost everything, There was also the 8052 AH BASIC, a 8051 with BASIC in ROM.. Was not a very good basic, but I still have a box with that that I build in the eighties.
You sound like a C++ or java cripple.