rmay635703 wrote on 2021-03-06, 15:35:
Harris originally planned on offering chips up to 33mhz but had too low of yields
Would have been quite interesting having a 286 that ran circles around many 386 machines
+1
The 80286 was a "limited", but serious design.
- Limited in so far, because the 80386 essentially was considered a real mainframe on a chip in these days.
That being said, the 80286 had qualities that laid the foundation for the 80386 and later generations.
- The 286 featured an integrated Memory Management Unit (MMU)
- It had virtual memory (1GB)
- Was multi-tasking capable
- Had support for exception handling, maskable interrupts (?)
- It introduced a priority scheme (ring scheme)
- Memory-protection based on segmentation
- Variable segment size (64KB max)
- Address calculations (such as base+index) were handled by a dedicated unit, not via ALU
In other words, it was a professional unit.
If it wasn't for the IBM PC and the desire to multi-task MS-DOS applications, it would have had a much better reputation.
What many people fail to understand, is, that the 286 was released in 1982 - just one year after the IBM Model 5150.
In that time frame, the IBM was totally irrelevant.
There were other MS-DOS Compatibles around, also.
It wasn't until a few years later that PC DOS had any real value.
So in simple words, development of the 286 had started earlier, maybe in 1979-1981.
At this point, the IBM PC wasn't even finished, either. It wasn't even clear what OS the PC should run.
CP/M was an option at the time. 😀
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