peterr (03/22/83)
----- News saved at Tue Mar 22 00:18:54 1983 A few extra details about the beast: There is still an (empty) socket for a co-processor on the mother board. No word yet about a faster CPU, so it almost certainly runs as fast as the old unit. The MicroScribe Winchester drive that IBM uses is somewhat special... it uses rack and pinion positioning, a technology that allows for cheaper platters at higher densities. MS-DOS 2.0 is still not available separately in Canada. General comment on the 8086 and its successors: It is interesting to see the slow revolution in software that was prompted by the 8086's built-in relocation registers. These relatively simple additions have opened the door to multi-tasking systems, which are slowly appearing (Concurrent CP/M, the various UN*X lookalikes, and MS-DOS 2.0). The next step will occur with the 80286, 68010, and 16032 which have virtual memory and protection mechanisms. Then we'll see demand-paged OS's (introducing users to the joys of thrashing). After that, we will see performance enhancements such as caches. Whether or not we'll see microcode programmability is an interesting question. Ditto for machines designed for distributed systems (though note that the Z8000 family, designed for high-performance, multi- processor systems (using chips such as FIFO buffers and very intelligent peripheral controllers) never really caught on... perhaps the uP community has to first get used to multi-tasking and the software techniques used to handle concurrency).