5 Nov
2008
5 Nov
'08
10:52 a.m.
Chuck asks:
Anyone remember the
Fairchild F8? Around the same time as the 9440, the F8 was hugely
popular in embedded type applications.
Mostek's 3870, a derivative of the F8, was popular throughout
all sorts of mass-produced products in the late 70's and through the 80's.
STMicro had a chip that was very similar (clone? derivative?) of the 3870 that
appeared in consumer products in the 90's.
General Instruments certainly took a very similar microcontroller (now
known as the PIC) and built it up and out in several directions.
Tim.
5 Nov
5 Nov
1:14 p.m.
On 5 Nov 2008 at 13:52, Tim Shoppa wrote:
General Instruments certainly took a very similar
microcontroller (now
known as the PIC) and built it up and out in several directions.
Did GI ever do anything much with the 1640/1650 before spinning the
micro division off as Microchip? Until the PIC micros were
announced, I was only vaguely aware of it, only that GI did the 1640
as an I/O processor for the (miserably slow) 1600.
GI did make use of the CP1600 in the Intellivision game boxes and
(ISTR) a couple of set-top boxes for the cable trade. Another CPU
with a nice architecture (aside from 10-bit instructions) that could
have been a lot more, but wasn't.
I think that one can see the same sort of thing happening now with
the TI MSP430 uC. A nice architecture (resembles the CP1600 in a lot
of ways, inclduing the absence of an inclusive-OR instruction), but
TI seems to not be interested in promoting it or expanding
capabilities.
Cheers,
Chuck
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