Single-board microcontrollers appeared in the late 1970s, when the appearance of early … See more

The bus of the early single-board devices, such as the Z80 and 6502, was universally a Von Neumann architecture. Program and data memory were accessed via the same shared bus, even though they were stored in fundame… See more

Some microcontroller boards using a general-purpose microprocessor can bring the address and data bus of the processor to an expansion connector, allowing additional memory or peripherals to be added. Thi… See more

Microcontroller systems provide multiple forms of input and output signals to allow application software to control an external "real-world" system. Discrete digital I/O provides a single bit of data (on or off). Analog sig… See more

Communications interfaces vary depending on the age of the microcontroller system. Early systems might implement a serial port to provide RS-232 or current loop. The serial port could be used by the application program or … See more

Many early systems had no internal facilities for programming, and relied on a separate "host" system for this task. This programming was typically done in assembly language, or sometimes in C or PL/M, … See more

Single-chip microcontrollers, such as the Intel 8748, combined many of the features of previous boards into a single IC package. Single-chip microcontrollers integrate memory (both RAM and ROM) on-packag… See more