On 12/22/2010 5:29 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
On 22 Dec 2010 at 16:25, Fred Cisin wrote:
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Himself BillG even gave it some happy words (but
then, what products
of Intel didn't he give happy words to?).
He called the 80286 "brain
dead"!
I remember Gordon Letwin (Microsoft OS/2) describing switching back
and forth between real and protected mode as being "like having to
turn off your engine to switch gears on the freeway".
I assume this was
before the LOADALL instruction was discovered. I
wonder if Letwin's statement was designed to confuse the competition,
since you"d think that Microsoft would be on the Intel developer
distribution list...
--Chuck
Developers didn't know about it. A friend of mine found and documented
it. It was not even in the Red covers for the processor.
Some other friends at Micro 5, who were writing a clone of the 286 bios
for their clone and the emm driver found that microsoft knew about it by
discovering it in their code, which could do protected mode entry /
exits and data transfers as a result "too fast" They disassembled and
reverse engineered the method and included it in their driver, which
when discovered caused a big fuss because intel thought they had
violated IP, (they were not nondisclosed).
And it was brain dead to do that. By the way, the loadall was in there
at all to support the bondout package version used in ICE. Up to that
time, INtel never had done a bondout chip special for any of their ice
products, but used the same die with more signals for that purpose.
Other vendors of ICE had to do elaborate things to support the ICE
function if it was doable at all.
Jim