C integral types [was Re: Semi-OT: Why Kids Can't use Computers] (fwd)

[James Knott]

Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> Well in many ways PC hardware was far from cutting edge.  It was just
> improving quickly in many ways.  It took many years for the PC to get
> anywhere near the hardware capabilities for sound and graphics that the
> Amiga or even most game consoles at the time had.

The IBM PC was pretty much built from off the shelf stuff.  I was amazed
at some of the poor design decisions.  One that comes to mind was that
interrupts were edge triggered, rather than the commonly used level
triggered.  This one point made it difficult to share interrupt lines on
the bus.  Another was putting the BIOS at top of memory, in violation of
Intel's guidelines. There were a few other things that caused poor
performance even for an 8088.

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists