This changed in the early 90s with the introduction of the BASIC Stamp from Parallax. This was a simple microcontroller development board using Microchip PIC. With a little bit of clever firmware ...

the BASIC Stamp 1 Interpreter Chip includes a PBASIC (Parallax BASIC), and the BASIC Stamp 2 includes a microcontroller (MCU). In addition to the BASIC Stamp offerings, Parallax offers a huge ...

The Basic Stamp 1. A Simple circuit with just a microcontroller ... The system requirements are only, an IBM PC or compatible, DOS 2.0+, 128k of RAM, and a disk drive. Meager requirements ...