MITS 2SIO serial chip?

From: Peter C. Wallace <pcw_at_mesanet.com>
Date: Sun Dec 16 17:12:58 2001

On Sun, 16 Dec 2001, Ben Franchuk wrote:

> ajp166 wrote:
> > PALS are 1970s technology, really old to some of us.
> Arg! And here I thought the 8008 was 70's technology.

Well more into the 80s since the PAL was invented in 1978...

>
> > Actually thats not true. BY 1981 you have peripherals in the 125ns read
> > write timing range. Then again Z80 at that time was just hinting at 6mhz
> > so z80 peripherals were of an according spped for that cpu. However,
> > other
> > parts were faster and often far cheaper.
>
> If you must know it is a floppy disk controller I need. Right now
> I plan to use WD2797 floppy disk controller. I would love to use
> a newer chip,but I can't find any! I want to stay with DIP's and PLCC's
> here. This may be the 21 century but my soldering skills are the 19'th.

Actually Its possible to do QFPs pretty easy with just a good soldering
iron and lots of flux... Even BGA's aren't too hard with a hot air gun
(surface tension does the work)


>
>
> > Personally if I wanted the SIO functionality for a NON-z80 system I'd
> > never use the zilog part. Reason it was not cheap,nor was it easy to
> > use for non-z80 systems. They were designed for the Z80, period.
> > Unfortunatly they were slow. If you wanted faster the 83xx or 85xx
> > parts from Zilog were a far better choice but Zbus was scary to most
> > people and they weren't cheap. The other part of this is NEC and
> > Intel did the MPSC (NEC D7201, INtel 8274) which was functionally
> > identical to the SIO and was "tuned" for 8080/8085/8088/8086 style
> > busses and faster as well. It was a more generic part than the SIO.
> > Also around that time Signetics and friends were doing the 2681 part
> > that was cheap and available in various flavors. Peripherals back then
> > were quite varied.
>
> I still favor the simple dumb uart chip. TR1602?. I like things than
> you hit reset, it starts ... not like the classic star-trek computers
> that always
> go down. Usually when you need them.
> --
> Ben Franchuk --- Pre-historic Cpu's --
> www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html
>

Can you still get TR1602's? I remember building something with them (maybe
it was a 1402) and 3341 FIFO's in the 70's

Peter Wallace
Received on Sun Dec 16 2001 - 17:12:58 GMT