The 8051 microcontroller is a Harvard architecture microcontroller developed by Intel in 1980 for use in embedded systems. It has separate program and data memories, 4 I/O ports, two 16-bit timers, a serial port, and can address up to 64KB of external memory. The 8051 has become widely used due to its low cost and availability of development tools from multiple manufacturers. It has a simple but powerful instruction set that can be easily learned, making it well suited for embedded applications.