The Intel 8048 microcontroller, Intel's first µC, was used in the Magnavox Odyssey² video game console and (in its 8042 variant) in the original IBM PC keyboard. The 8048 was inspired by, and is somewhat similar to, the Fairchild F8 microprocessor.

The 8048 has a modified Harvard architecture, with internal or external program ROM and 64–256 bytes of internal (on-chip) RAM. The I/O is mapped into its own address space, separate from programs and data. Though the 8048 was eventually replaced by the very popular Intel 8051, even at the turn of the millennium it remains quite popular, due to its low cost, wide availability, memory efficient one-byte instruction set, and mature development tools. Because of this it is much used in high-volume consumer electronics devices such as TV sets, TV remotes, toys, and other gadgets where cost-cutting is essential.

Reportedly, most if not all PC AT keyboards contain a variant of the 8049AH microcontroller. An 8042 is located in the PC, and can be accessed through port 0x60 (PII+ PCs have it built into the chipset). The 8049 has 2 KiB of masked ROM (the 8749 has EPROM) that can be replaced with a 4 KiB external ROM, as well as 128 bytes of RAM and 27 I/O ports. The µC's oscillator block divides the incoming clock into 15 internal phases, thus with its 11 MHz max. crystal one gets 0.73 MIPS (of one-clock instructions). Some instructions are single byte/cycle one, but a large amount of opcodes need two cycles and/or two bytes, so the raw performance would be closer to 0.5 MIPS.

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