strangest systems I've sent email from

Because the 808x was a 16-bit processor with 1MB physical addressing. I would argue that for the time 808x was brilliant in that most other 16-bit micros only allowed for 64KB physical. If people wanted more they had to add external hardware and the calling linkage became problematic (I know because that?s what we did on the IBM S/23 Datamaster that used an 8085 and allowed for 192KB of ROM and 128KB of RAM). Floating point was not common at the time in micros because of the number of transistors/gates necessary for the implementation. Intel added it as a ?coprocessor? in the 8087. When I was at IBM we continually railed on Intel to make floating point standard so that we could have code that assumed floating point was always present. It finally happened with the 80486 but then Intel took it away again (sort-of) with the 486-SX which was brilliant marketing by Intel?initially allowed them to sell ?floor swept? 486?s with non-functional floating point units?eventually their process improved and more often than not 486-SX systems that had the floating point coprocessor actually had 2 fully functional 486 processors! TTFN - Guy