My involvement with micros started with the "original" Intel 4004, then the 8008, and on to the 8080 and eventual employment at Motorola Semiconductor (Phoenix) as Technical Trainer and Senior Applications Engineer for the 6800 and 68000 line of micros. For some years, I was an instructor at several community colleges teaching microprocessors. Following that was a 6 year hitch as the Director of Engineering for a small Scottsdale firm where I not only supervised others, but was totally responsible for products using microcontrollers from inception through PCB layout, firmware, software, manufacturing, testing, and field service.
One of my achievements for this firm was taking an existing product costing them about $750 to manufacture and it had numerous quality and operational problems, and redesigning it to less than 1/10th the size, weight, and power consumpion and costing about $230 to manufacture. As far as I know, the original firmware code I wrote is still being used in this product, without any known bugs or changes required. The product passed FCC part 15 certification with flying colors on the first attempt.
Later, I was employed by a well known corporation and did work for them using the Microchip PIC and Atmel AVR in high production, embedded applications.
My current "love" in the microcontroller line is the Atmel AVR series, although I don't exclude other interesting ones, both new and old.
EMBEDDED SYSTEMS DESIGN