The 8051 micro has been on the scene for a number of years now since the early 80's.
There are literally hundreds of derivatives.. Ti, Silicon, Atmel, Microchip, Cypress and many many more have come up with several products using this core..... I used Phillips personally. These chips came with a tight boot-loader... With a free program called “Flash Magic” you could simply write a program, compile or assemble to a hex file and flash magic puts it on the device through the serial port....