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Roland Perry · January 23rd 13, 02:50 PM posted to uk.transport.london

In message , at 14:20:48 on Wed, 23 Jan
2013, d remarked:
After that, IBM decided on an architecture that split the 1MB up into
the motherboard and peripherals (where in this case the BIOS, whose
primary job was controlling peripherals, broadly counts as peripheral

Ah the beauty of a von neuman architecture. Not. If we'd used the harvard
layout life would have been a lot simpler plus malware would be a lot harder
to write and a lot easier to spot.

But it might have cost a few pence more to build the CPUs so obviously it
couldn't be used.

The chips Intel designed, and which were used by IBM for their first
PCs, were not really intended to be building blocks for what I called at
the time "mini-computer emulators". They were much more for embedded use
as logic replacements. Not even the 286 (used in the IBM-AT). The first
one which properly addressed that market was the 386.
--
Roland Perry