The lion kingdom's 2nd parallel port PIC programmer of 18 years was finally recycled. There are no more confusers with a parallel port it could run on. It was kept around for the chance a pickit bricked itself & needed to be reprogrammed from a hex file. 1 pickit bricked itself long ago, but another one has held on. There are now many ways to program a pickit. 3 PIC programmers were actually built. The 1st connected a parallel port to the target by alligator clips. The 2nd connected a parallel port by ribbon cable. #3 adapted USB to a ribbon cable. The lion kingdom's 1st PIC free samples arrived in March 2004 while the workhorse robot was still being developed, using a 68HC11. It was real hard to create a programming environment for the PICs. There was no C compiler for Linux. The virtual machine was vmware & very hard to use. Math routines had to be written in assembly from scratch. The 14V was real ...