4 ms·
It feels like there were a lot of missteps for the embedded market which got crushed beneath the juggernaut of PC-compatible x86 chips. The big one was the 801
by hakfoo 6y ago
It feels like there were a lot of missteps for the embedded market which got crushed beneath the juggernaut of PC-compatible x86 chips.
The big one was the 80186/188-- basically an 8086/8088 with a few onboard timers and serial controllers and a few enhanced instructions, but the new goodies were not in a PC-compatible design. You do see them quite often in embedded devices.
The more interesting one was the 80376-- a 386 which was protected-mode only, but also missed other key features so it wasn't just "take a 386 oS and change the bootloader."
- anyfoo 6y agoI'm familiar with both of those. In fact, I even own two 80186 PCs! Siemens PC-Ds, not IBM but DOS compatible. Marvelous machines. They even have MMUs made of custom logic chips, so they could not only run DOS, but also SINIX with full address space separation and supervisor mode (though no paging)... The non-compatible goodies of the 80186 play a big role in making it not IBM compatible, but other things as well. In many ways it was a bit better, e.g. high resolution (but monochrome) text and graphics, and no 640k barrier. The 80376 is an interesting beast because it got rid of 16bit support entirely--any 16bit segment descriptors were invalid.
- anyfoo 6y agoErr, "custom MMUs made of individual logic chips" is what I meant. The MMUs are custom, the logic chips are just of the 74 variety.