A little sad that Atmel ATmega8 is not there, it was the first to have flash on a micro and was many people's first chip including me in high school class. And of course the heart of the Arduino.
ATmega is a relatively recent part - the first AVRs were the 90S series, can;t remember the relative chronology but I believe the PIC16C84 was the first mainstream non-OTP part, (although technically EEPROM rather than flash, this didn;t really matter). Microchip already had a growing user base from their earlier OTP parts, so the 84 got a flying start.
Atmel had low mainstream visibility back then, and were only interested in high volume users, whearas Microchip have always supported low-volume users. Atmel also had some disasterous leadtime problems for over a year around the time Microchip were getting an increasing foothold in the market.
I'd actually argue that the PIC16C5x series was even more influential than the C84, as it was undoubtedly the first chip that was designed specifically to use OTP EPROM for production, and opened up MCUs to a whole new market lower volume customers, and the first that was targetted heavily to low and mid volume users - before that, EPROM and OTP parts were very expensive and seen as only useful for prototyping mask-ROM parts. At the time, the cheapest non-mask MCU solution was something like an 8031 with external EPROM.
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