On Tuesday 12 November 2002 11:58 am, Gregg C Levine wrote: > Actually that was my reaction. The demonstration packet that they sent > me, was the thing that did it. The terms, "kludge", and "clumsy", and a > few others that were not polite, crossed my mined, at the time. And you > are right about what Intel thought it was. They made up a chip for the > 8086 hardware grouping that included a firmware kernel of the product. > Funny, they also did the same for a different OS for the 8086. Both part > numbers are long since retired, or even discontinued.
Oooh! Ooooh! Mister Kotter! I remember those! The 80130 was a chip that contained an iRMX86 kernel in ROM plus some timer and I/O support glue. The 80150 contained the core of CPM/86 in the ROM but was otherwise the same as the 80130. They came in 40-pin DIPs if I recall. I've still got the databooks around here somewhere, probably. RMX was actually a pretty decent o.s., when used for its intended purposes. The 80130 and 80150 never took off in the marketplace, largely because their mask-programmed ROMs were obsolete too quickly and because EPROMs dropped in price very rapidly at the same time. Also, both of these chips were quirky from a hardware design standpoint; I forget the details, but I remember them being difficult to design-in for one reason or another. The summer I worked for Intel, I did a lot of sysgens of RMX86 for our big, powerful servers. You know, those fully-loaded "minicomputer" chassis with a whopping 768K of RAM and over 5 megabytes of hard disk on line. And I've just realized how far this poor thread has drifted off-topic. I'm willing to drop it if you are. :-) Scott -- ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Scott D. Courtney, Senior Engineer Sine Nomine Associates [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.sinenomine.net/
