Book excerpt: The purpose of this book is to present the technology requied to develop hardware and software for embedded controller systems at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods. Included in the book are hardware schematics of 8051 family development systems (single board and bussed 8051 microcontroller). Source code for both the 8086 and 805 family FORTH operating systems is published in the book. Binary images of the opeating systems can be generated from teh source code using the metacompiler also contained in the book. The book can be seen as a "toolbox" includingg all the necessary hardware and software information to be used in constructing 8051-based controller systems.