20 Aug
2010
20 Aug
'10
7:33 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
But DEC had their own meaning for
'microprocessor' to mean a 'microcoded
control system'. I seem to remember that the control logic of a VT52 and
that of the DMC11, etc are called 'microprocessors' in the DEC manuals,
for all the are built from lots of MSI chips, and there's nothing that
the rest of the world would call a microprocessor (a chip such as a Z80,
6800, 8080, 6502, etc)
IBM used that definition as well. The "PALM" (Put All Logic in
Microcode) board-level processor of the IBM 5100 Portable Computer,
introduced in 1975, was referred to as a microprocessor. It was
implemented primarily from IBM's "Duchess" TTL gate arrays, containing
up to 134 gates each.