Annals of OS and network history

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Tue Mar 10 15:53:24 1998

<> More recently, Intel designed the 8089 I/O co-processor as part
<> of the 8086 family. It had an instruction set optimized for I/O
<> functions.

And not so recently starting with the AT and all after the keyboard
interface chip is a slave cpu (8041a or 8042).

In 81 I started a system using multiple z80s and 8085s to do things
like disk IO and loosely coupled multiprocessing (using z80s). When I
had it up and operational it could outrun a dos powered 386/20.

Slave procesors and distributed cpus are not new. One favorite is the
PDP-12, a PDP-8 with a linc-8 as a peripheral. The PDP-10 used PDP-8
as an IO processor or later ones used PDP-11s. Even the Microvax-II
disk controller had a T-11(chip version of a base PDP-11).

Allison
Received on Tue Mar 10 1998 - 15:53:24 GMT