ZZzzzzz - I go to bed now and stop editing this..
PICs are small microprocessors with on chip memory. They are ideal for peripheral control and other such things.
The PICList (start here)
PS/2 keyboard and mouse (16F84)
(Alternate link)
(Scancodes: Set 2)
GNUPIC
Peer Ouwehand's LCD pages
gputils (the GNU PIC Utilities package)
Forest Electronics (cheap u.k. supplier)
Microchip (the manufacturer)
An introduction to the CAN bus.
Eventually I realised I really wanted to be spending my time producing something interesting rather than debugging 8bit code - so I got myself a couple of LART Boards (then one of the only cheap ARM boards around) and played wih those for few years.
My current chipset of choice (just about: the Phillips LPC chips are fighting.)