You might be a child in the 70s if:
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FredA
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I have over 30,000 I personally typed (with one finger) in my attic..
My wife keeps asking why I keep them................ "Nostalgic works of art" is the best I can come up with.
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I very strongly suspect that you've misremembered that. The 8086/8088 is an Intel chip with a "philosophically" similar architecture to the 8080 (and 8085 and Z80) but not byte compatible. That architecture was completely different from the Motorola architecture of the 680x series that culminated in the 6809.
There's more to a processor's architecture than it's register set, yet that alone shows how radically different the 6809 and 8086 are.
NTP2
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I guess since you wrote your own programs you don’t have to worry about compatibility.
Yes, I said the 8088 was "Backwards" from the Moto designs. Also the Low Byte / High Byte vs the High Byte / Low byte stuff if I recall correctly.
NTP2
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Wow a company would NEVER provide that much documentation for there computer these days!
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"Big-Endian" vs. "Little-Endian"
OH! My bad. Opposite endedness, of course.
I read "backwards Byte wise from MOTO" as "backwards [compatible] Byte wise [machine language] from MOTO".
That's not the half of it. They actually published the entire schematic. You might be interested in part five of sheet 1. That's the keyboard matrix. The TRS-80 decoded the matrix to produce ASCII(ish) codes in software, as you suggested. An encoder chip takes that burden off of the CPU and frees up some memory address space, but adds a little bit of cost.
Anyway, as to "A company would never provide that much documentation...", well, most wouldn't.
Arduino UNO R3:
This is for one of the Raspberry Pi models. But Arduino and R-Pi are both not for profit, and are both a lot less complicated than, say, a PC motherboard.
Parker Big Red ballpoint. I still have mine.
Does the Red match the Swingline Stapler ?
Not only did Rat Shack, but Apple II and IBM PC published the total docs. The Idea was so after market manufactures of hardware add-ons and software would support their product and make it popular; AND IT WORKED.
IBM in around '86/87 decided to make a new product that was proprietary. The IBM PSII. Nothing was disclosed unless you licensed it and/or Authorized.
Same thing Jobs did to the MAC and closed it up. IBM's was a flop and the original MACs caused Apple bankruptcy*. IBM's problems in PCs finally caused them to sell the line to Lenovo in China.
They should have stayed open docs, as Wozniak had always wanted.
*Edit: Jobs left at that time and created the NEXT PC, that went over so well that hardly anyone remembers it. Apple Hired the Pepsi CEO and he put Caffeine into the MACs to get them to sell , well they did hire the CEO...
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And DEC made the same mistake with their PRO 300 line, a contemporary of the PC-XT, far superior hardware, very poor choice of OS, little third party software, and as far as I know not a shred of third party hardware. A fast and utter market flop that helped put DEC out of business (one of several factors). But of course, we're up to '83 now.
I remember that and have seen one in person.
As a member of the freshman class of '83 at Stevens Institute of Technology, I had one. It was a nice machine, but coulda shoulda been so much better.
They do provide data for the chips, and companies producing the boards will have everything well-documented.
I did a project about five years ago using a Zync chip (dual-core CPUs and FPGA on the one chip). Total amount of data sheets I had to consume for that was north of 15k pages. Plenty of good documentation
. It wasn't just the main chip if course. There were multiple other memories, Ethernet, USB, programming, power supplies and sequencing to deal with too.
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FredA
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As somebody who spent a decade doing reference designs for Intel consumer PC's, we gave away everything. Sure, you don't get the micro-code, but you could get the schematics and all the board collateral for you to do the HS paths or just copy and paste them. We would build and give away about 10k working units with full design/build collateral to "seed" the ODM's so they can do things like add a USB port and call it their own design.
There was a blizzard in 64 in Detroit too. I was 8. In 78 Detroit must have been hit hard. I don't remember the winter of 78 being bad in Ann Arbor.
Toledo was totally buried. Our neighborhood was impassable by car for over a week. Lucky we had power.
It was down wind of many farm fields as a new development.
NTP2
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Wow, I know where I was that day, but no one was making a big deal over the date. I just know where I was in July that year.
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Pier 1
shockie
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If you survived the 70's and are still kickin'
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My life has been savaged by endians!
I started programming in 6502 machine code without an assembler(!) in '78. The MOS Technology 6502 (used in the first Apple and Atari computers in the 70's ) is the ancient ancestor of the ARM processor. My boss at GE in the early 80's was one of the 6502 designers. I stuck with Motorola processors for many years (68HC11, 68000 series). Then came the 80x86 nightmare of porting OS code and printer drivers in mixed C and assembler into 68000 code. My face is twitching uncontrollably as I'm typing this.
I've avoided Intel ever since. I circled back to Moto/Freescale embedded processors and then ARM processors of all sizes. C/C++ mostly with some assembler.
You were a little hesitant to drink the red Kool-Aid for a while.
Cape Byron
Rocket kits from the Land of Oz
Your Batman costume was awesome.
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