I knew the 8052 was active high, but not that the industry standard was active low, cheers for that. I assume the norm in this case is to find a compatible supervisor and not invert the signal with some sort of extra electronics

This has helped me understand the operation of these devices. now onto speed and capabilities of certain 8052 derivatives!

can anyone reply to my reply on the timing isssues of microcontrollers, where i list the application I wish to use this for, and comment on whether the 8052 family is suitable. (I do not understand much about how different derivatives are slower to process information received in terms of clock cycles and also outputing. I assumed that this would certainly be fast enough to display the revs of a car in real time on an LCD display as it was 8bit, and not exactly a slow chip)

Joel