oolidjr@hubcap.UUCP (Joe Moll) (12/09/88)
Hmm... That seems strange. An 80188 is an 8/16 bit hybrid of the
80186. The hardware of this chip makes it non-MSDOS compatible. If you
are talking about a MSDOS type laptop, I suggest that you satisfy your
curiousity (and mine, for that matter) and open that case and look.
This is not to take away from the 80186. It is a good chip with many of
the support chips that are external to the 8086 (on the IBM PC and
clones) supported on-board the 80186 itself. It has its own interrupt
controller, its own DMA, and its own timer. Alot of good stuff on
this chip, eh?
The reason that it is not IBM (messdos) compatible is because some of
the software interrupts that messdos uses are used by the on-board
hardware of the 80186. This would make a darn good microcontroller,
however. It DOES execute 8086 instructions. Can we say high-level
language??
About all I have to say 'bout the matter ...
Joe
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