I miss the good days of sending a full byte to a hardware uart in one go and have the program go do something else...
But that's EXACTLY what you do with a PICs USART anyway...

Actually thinking about it...

I also (kinda) loved frying z80 chips when i got hardware wrong... programming in machine code, tape drives, 3" floppies... ahhh those were the days... although, battery backed ram modules were cool...
You can do all of the above with PICs too...