6 Sep
2007
6 Sep
'07
4:11 a.m.
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
On Wednesday 05 September 2007 14:10, Chris M wrote:
I've got a couple of ISA boards here with ARM1 processors on; one has Acorn
Podule bus hardware fitted so that in theory it can interact with
Acorn-specific expansion cards.
I'm jumping in here mid-thread though so have lost some of the context - I
can't think of a scenario where you plugged an entire machine (implying things
like keyboard and video interfaces too) into an AT, but there were certainly
all sorts of cards of the "CPU/memory/ROM/ISA interface" around onto which
code could be offloaded.
I suppose the question is: "when is a coprocessor card not a computer"? :-)
cheers
Jules
--
"What progress. It's almost as good as taping it... on tapes which self
destruct in seven days."
- Bill Bailey on the BBC's "watch again" service
Here's a neato question: You mentioned
coprocessor
boards, and in fact some kinda sorta functioned that
way (in some sense - stuff got offloaded to the mpu on
the board I guess). But what were some early ancillary
processor boards for the pc/at/?. That is, where you
plugged a whole 'nother puter into your main puter,
and got to run separate apps off of that? Hmmmmm
I'm remembering a couple of those in Byte, which I stopped reading sometime
in the eighties. A 32032? (I never could keep the numbers of that family
straight). A Z8000 for sure. Maybe a 68K of some sort. It's all very
fuzzy...