26 Jan
2012
26 Jan
'12
8:22 p.m.
On Jan 26, 2012, at 10:16 PM, Jecel Assumpcao Jr. wrote:
Alexandre, about the 188 processor: it was just an
8088 with some
peripherals built in (like the iAPX186 was the 8086 with the same
devices). Unfortunately, this chip was designed before the IBM PC became
important so it used different addresses for the same funcionas (timers,
dmas, interrupt controllers). You could build a DOS machine with this,
but not a PC clone so it didn't last very long in the market. If this
board has a reasonable amount of memory, then it actually is a more
powerful computer than its Apple II host.
That depends; TTC (the company the the founders of my company and about 1/3 of the current
employees worked for before it was no longer fun) made a lot of telecom testers based on
the '186/'188. They were decent little embedded chips, and that's where they
found most of their market in the end (you could still, as of a few years ago, get modern
copies or at least ASIC cores of a '186; I saw a server-in-an-Ethernet-jack that used
a tiny '186 for its brain).
I think TTC had also made a significant investment in the tools, which also played a much
bigger part in the selection. :-)
Of course, there are lots of examples of peripheral boards being more powerful than their
hosts; I'm pretty sure the 10MHz 68000 one my DELQA is more powerful than the
PDP-11/23+ it runs in. If not, it's probably just about at parity.
- Dave