On 07/14/2015 02:53 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
Again, you're missing the point.
This was a fairly specific CDC Cyber thing - not a widely adopted idea
in the industry, as was originally asked for.
The channel controller/director idea, on the other hand, was very
widely adopted.
That's true--but at the time, CDC's design made a huge amount of sense.
The CPU was left to do what it did best--crunch numbers without the
burden of managing the I/O activity and responding to interrupts. In
that sense, the CPU was treated as more of a peripheral device. In
fact, you could order a CPU-less system. (6416?)
You can still see the general scheme implemented today on the Parallax
Probeller MPU, which, some, I'm sure will tell you, is a pretty nifty
design.
--Chuck
