Re: Proposed Assembler Commands

In article <pan.2005.05.04.02.28.30.928399@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
Rich Grise <richgrise@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
[....]
>As a matter of fact, I used "credit" (CRt EDITor) on one of Intel's MDSs,
>back in the days when the guy who got a couple of TMS2716 samples had to
>guard them with his life. Of course, in the colleges, they were giving
>away 8086's like popcorn. I'm almost sure the MDS (microprocessor
>development system) was an industrialized 8080/S-100. I was working on
>triple-redundant Naval Ordnance systems. (I had dropped out of college, to
>get a _real_ education.)

The MDS-800 was a card cage which held "multibus" cards. It had room for
something like 10 cards. There was a row of switches on the front panel.
You could assert an interrupt with 8 of them. One of them swapped a chunk
of RAM space with some ROM to boot the machine.

Later came the "series 2". These were a combined terminal and "multibus"
rack. It had room for 4 boards mounted horizontally in the bottom. The
"series 2" machines had a design flaw where the current in some Molex
connectors was more than they could be trusted to handle. The connectors
were a cheap single wipe design in a white plactic housing. After a few
months of service they would become a zero wipe connector is a brown
plastic housing.

After the "series 2" came the "series 3". This was intended to develop
8086 code also. It was a "series 2" sitting on a box for 4 more multibus
cards. The new section had a 8086 card in it. It would also run ICE-86.

ICE-86 was an emulator for the 8086. It copied mostly the commands of
ICE-80. You could load the program into the RAM iside the ICE-86 and run
it on your target hardware. The load operation took (on my project) 4
hours[1] to load the code. If you loaded a small program and then
transfered the real code via a RS232 link it was much faster so that is
what we did.

[1] No kidding folks.

After the "series 3" came the "series 4" which led us to state that each
version is better than the next.

The operating system was something called ISIS. It was a more advanced
operating system than MSDOS was on the day the PC came out.


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