PICkit
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The PICkit1 was a rudimentary USB programmer for PIC microcontrollers. It was integrated into a demo board featuring 4 LEDs, a switch, and a potentiometer. Its default program (explained in the documentation) rotates the LEDs in series. The direction is reversed with the pushswitch and the speed is changed with the potentiometer.
The PICkit2 is the replacement for the PICkit1. It is a much more full-featured and convenient development tool, in that it separates the programmer / debugger unit from the evaluation board. This eliminates the need to insert the chip being programmed into a demo board. The PICkit2 uses an internal PIC18F2550 with FullSpeed USB. The latest PICkit2 firmware allows the user to program and debug most of the 8 and 16 bit PICmicro and dsPIC members of the Microchip productline.
The PICkit 2 is open to the public, including its hardware schematic, firmware source code (in C language) and application programs (in C# language). End users and third parties can easily modify both the hardware and software for enhanced features. e.g. Linux version of PICKit 2 application software, DOS style CMD support, etc.
The PICkit 2 has a programmer-to-go (PTG) feature, which can download the hex file and programming instructions into on-board memory (128K byte I2C EEPROM or 256K byte I2C EEPROM), so that no PC is required at the end application.
The Microchip version of PICkit 2 has a standard 128K byte memory; 256K byte memory can be achieved by modifying the hardware or from third party.
Since release of V2.61, PICkit 2 PC software now support max 4M bytes of memory for programmer-to-go feature. This modification makes the PICKit 2 support 8x more memory than the PICKit 3. This enhancement has been contributed by Au Group Electronics, and, the PICkit 2 firmware is also reported been submitted to Microchip PICkit 2 team in the middle of March-2009, hopefully this enhancement will be integrated into future firmware releases too.