Gregory's ServerThe 8086 was a big improvement over the 8080, a 16-bit processor instead of 8. The 8086's registers names originally matched the Datapoint ones: A, B, C, D, E, H, L as shown in this 8086 patent diagram. But these were renamed AX, BX, CX, and DX just before release.
|
7 comments
 So that's how the modern x86 architecture developed from an obscure desktop computer called the Datapoint 2200. For lots of details and a close look at the instruction sets, see my blog post: https://www.righto.com/2023/08/datapoint-to-8086.html Credits: Altair photo by Colin Douglas, (CC BY-SA 2.0) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Altair_8800,_Smithsonian_Museum_(white_background).jpg  @kenshirriff I read your earlier (but in substance identical) account of the Datapoint/Intel history a while ago. It is mind-blowing how the design decisions of a rather obscure intelligent terminal in 1970 still shape a large part of computing today, more than 50 years later β and probably for decades to come. No one could have ever imagined that at the time, and I even have a hard time grasping it now. Thanks a lot for sharing this!   @kenshirriff @kenshirriff @schotanus I have never worked on it but in the mid 80βs, Neddata, the IT part of Nedlloyd Shipping Company had one small but important system running on a Datapoint. The rest was working on IBM mainframe(s)and something new called DEC. We had one PC, for 125 it-emplyees. π |
The 8086 was designed to be backward compatible with the 8080 through a conversion program called CONV86, so it inherited the Datapoint features. The 8086 was extended to the modern x86 architecture used in most laptops and servers today.