[rescue] A bit of Fun

[Dave McGuire]

On Tuesday, June 17, 2003, at 04:58 PM, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
>> The obvious whipping boy here, IMHO, is the 80286.  Intel had a great
>> opportunity to fix the mistakes made in the design of the 8086 while
>> maintaining a backward compatibility mode ... and they STILL screwed 
>> the
>> pooch.
>
> Hadn't thought of that take.  They -tried- with the 80186, but the 
> whole
> world peed on them for not making it compatible.  However, unlike the
> 80286, isn't the 80186 still made?

   The 80186 is a very popular (and current) chip in the "deeply 
embedded" (my term) world...things like hard drives and such.  It's 
little more than an 8086 with a DMA controller, interrupt controller, 
and a few other things on the same die.

   Take pretty much any SCSI drive from the 2GB-9GB (or so) range and 
flip it over...chances are you'll see an 80186 on the board, probably 
from AMD.

         -Dave

--
Dave McGuire             "I've grown hair again, just
St. Petersburg, FL           for the occasion."       -Doc Shipley