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I don't know if it's popular in the US but it is in the UK and Australia. It's a series of super-easy PIC controllers that are very cheap and programed in a version of BASIC though a serial port, no special programmer circuitry required. They have A to D inputs and servo control outputs. They are great for school projects and Silicon Chip magazine always has lots of project articles for them. See http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/

Depends alot on your definition of laptop.

Chris Fenton, living in NYC, made his own laptop, based on a picaxe microcontroller.

http://chrisfenton.com/diy-laptop-v2/

Picaxe controllers are sold by a firm in Bath, UK

http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/

I'm guessing a picaxe is a pic controller with some proprietary firmware on top.

pic controllers are made by Microchip out of Arizona. Their environmental health and safety page implies they might be involved in Thailand, maybe.

Now, I have no idea where the copper wire was made, where the LCD screen was made, batteries, etc. Theres alot more than just the microcontroller.

A picaxe *is* a popular Microchip PIC, running a nifty bootstrap program developed by Revolution Education in the UK. It's intended to make microcontroller accessible to everyone, using a 3-wire in-circuit programming system so schools don't have to pay for a programmer, and so that kids can't break said programmer.

The development environment uses an intuitive BASIC compiler so people with no programming experience (pre-teen kids, or just biology graduates like myself) can be writing working programs in hours.

The IDE is free-as-in-beer and the picaxe chips are cheap (under five bucks for the smaller ones) and widely available.

Yes this is a plug, I'm not affiliated with Revolution Education but I probably wouldn't have had the stamina to get into microcontrollers without them.

There's a link to the manufacturer in the summary. http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/

Kudos to the guy who built this laptop - building your own custom filesystem using only basic is pretty badass!

PS. If you really *must* use an Atmel CPU, a nice implementation is the Arduino. http://arduino.cc/en/Main/HomePage

I just found out that, as the name clearly suggests, it's a preprogrammed PIC microcontroller.

See for yourself at http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/ in the Technical Frequently Asked Questions PDF file:

What is a PICAXE microcontroller?

A PICAXE microcontroller is a Microchip PIC microcontroller that has been pre-
programmed with the PICAXE bootstrap code. The bootstrap code enables the
microcontroller to be reprogrammed without the need for an (expensive)
conventional programmer, making the whole download system a very low-cost
simple serial cable!
The bootstrap code also contains common routines (such as how to generate a
pause delay or a sound output), so that each download does not have to waste time
downloading this commonly required data. This makes the download time much
quicker.

I'm sure this "laptop" would have been much faster if based around an AVR. But that would have required more work.

PICs Are great, they are even good to integrate with a basic electronics course. Heck, if you wanted to go even simpler you could use picaxe chips. http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/. they use a basic-esque command set thats preloaded on the chip, comes with all software and a programming manual that students can easily read an learn by themselves. The best part is that as soon as they're done the basics, you can move on to actually programming them with native instructions.

These little chips are a fun and cheap way to combine basic programming and electronics. They're also quite powerful. Very few parts are required to program a picaxe - another bonus. Have fun and learn by playing! http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/picaxe/