The PIC is not blank its already soldered onto a piece of working equipment.
The new devices we reprogram with a laptop that has special software that sends data via the serial port straight into the max232e thats wired directly to the PIC. The older devices are exactly the same except no connection port and no mac232e chip. from what i can see there are only 3 connections from the max232 the the PIC
I just don't know what they connect to..... RB5,RB6,RB7,Vdd,Vss or MCLR ?