Dec Rainbow prehistory

From: ben franchuk <bfranchuk_at_jetnet.ab.ca>
Date: Thu Nov 20 17:07:16 2003

Tom Jennings wrote:

> If I recall, performance wise they werent' bad! They had shared
> *memory*, not all that much of it and weird semaphores I think, but it
> suuure beats a shared IO port or other nasty hack. Actual overlapping
> IO.

Was not a version of DECMATE? ( PDP-8 ) also a CMOS PDP-8/Z80 dual machine?

> It wasn't possible with MSDOS, but you could easily queue up disk
> writes/reads on hte Z80 side, and have the Z80 tell the 8086 only upon
> error, etc.
>
I still think the 8086 needed to have the 8080 instruction set microcoded
in and better 16 bit opcode design.
Ben.
Received on Thu Nov 20 2003 - 17:07:16 GMT