Hi all. I wrote a personal reminiscence about a project I worked on in the early 1980s. The system included both i8085 processors and a DEC LSI-11. It’s a story about using these devices to construct a complex real world system. There’s a section The Computers which includes several paragraphs, e.g. The 8085 was an 8-bit CPU with 16-bit addresses. It executed perhaps 500,000 instructions per second… and The LSI-11 was the VLSI-based low end of the Digital Equipment’s venerable PDP-11 computer family… in addition to some words about a fairly obscure 8080 family peripheral chip, the 8273.
The context is, or was, testing submarine-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (SLBMs).
“The 8273 HDLC controller was riddled with bugs.” You might know that it’s the same chip as the 8271 floppy disk controller, with different microcode. It contains two very different processors and is a huge chip. See Ken Shirriff and Stardot for more.
That’s pretty cool! I had some experience with the LSI-11 and using RT-11 for fortran and PDP-11 macro assembly. Still have my architecture and programming book for the PDP-11 somewhere in my library…
Thanks for sharing and for giving me some nostalgia to look back on.
Loved building my first microcontroller board, called COSMAC with the RCA1802, about 45 years ago
All in assembly using switches and LED’s
Wish I still had it.
Loved it
