Assembly is dead, etc.

Hi I have a AMD 80188 developement board with flash memory for programs. I also have a couple of STD board with both 80186's and 80C187's ( quite rare ). I have a board made by an embedded manufature that was used as a vehicle reporting and locating that included a GPS unit. It has several RS232 connections ( 6 as I recall ). I can't think why a truck would need 6 RS232 connections. These were pulled units and had one main problem. Most of the RS232 level converter chips were blown. A vehicle is not the place to put unprotected RS232. The starter generates some really nasty high voltage spikes that can even cause significant spikes from ground to ground in the frame ( high frequency spikes ). I put a version of Forth on both the AMD board and on the truck box. One has access to the world of I/O and even assembly from a good Forth setup. Later, I was told by some else that they'd taken my implementation of Forth and run it as is on a US Robotics phone modem. It is interesting that mode implementations of 80188/86 are so similar. Dwight