Intel CPU's (was: Re: Chroma CPU)

[The Dark force of dance]

Y-ellow Duane 'n' y'all.
	Thanks for that run down Duane. I always thought that intel were
developing a better 8 bit when they came up with the 8088/86. That they,
seeing there was potential for 16 bit, simply tacked on an extra 8 bits.
(as it were) I was led to believe that their original intentions was simply
a faster/better/whatever 8 bit processor but motorola announced their
intentions for a 16 bit processor (68K) and intel quickly decided to shift
focus mid stream. Thus the 64K window and memory segmenting. Often
euphemistically referred to as "memory Management."

I actually have a 4004 and a few 8008s. Historical value now but curious
none the less. I'm only really interested in embeddeds these days but I
find it curious how we've almost come full circle. Going from tiny little
16 pin chips  through to great big huge PGAs and back to little 20 pin
chips. As in the ATMEL 2051s. Of which, I'm absolutely smitten with at the
moment.

What I find even funnier than Bill's 640K limit was IBM's 1K I/O limit.
Unlike apple's screen split where you have to write to two different
locations to access the screen. Because by doing that, they saved
themselves a whole OR-GATE. IBM actually added extra logic to prevent the
chip being able to access any more than 1024 I/O addresses.

Of course 640K would have seemed fine back in those days. 10 times the
practical limit of any 8 bit and people actually wrote efficient code back
then.

Be absolutely Icebox.

 _ __        _                              
| "_ \      | |         batzman at all-electric.com / aek at all-electric.com
| |_)/  __ _| |_ ____           ALL ELECTRIC KITCHEN               
|  _ \ / _` | __|___ |  The Elementary Urban sanity CD
| |_) | (_| | |_  / /   out now on Transmission Communications
|_,__/ \__,_|\__|/ /    
                / ,__   http://www.all-electric.com
Goodfortune    |_____|