IBM 5150 maximum memory?

[Tony Duell]

> 
> Date: Sat, 26 Apr 2008 20:58:36 +0100 (BST)
> From: Tony Duell
> 
> > Another silly thing is that refresh was controlled by a DMA channel. I'm
> > sure it saved a couple chips, but it meant that errant, or 
> > 
> > And, indeed, using the 8237 DMA chip with a paging register (and not even
> > doing that as elegantly as the FTS-88 did, which at least had one paging
> > register per DMA channel) rather than using the 8089 'I/O processor'. 
> 
> The 5150 has 4 page registers, one for each DMA channel (an LS670 4x4 
> RAM).  Of course that limits one to doing DMA inside of 64K physical 

Not really. The paging registers are indeed a '670, ut only 3 locations 
are used. The Read Address lines (RA and RB) are tied to the DACK2/ and 
DACK3/ outputs of the 8237 DMA chip, which means that location 00 is 
never used (the 8237 can never assert DACK2 and DACK3 at the same time) 
and that channels 0 and 1 share a paging register.

It probably doesn't matter too much in the PC since channel 0 was 
supposed to be used for refresh (and thus the page is irrelevant), but....


The FTS-88 had a '148 priority encoder (IIRC) between the DMA cotnroller 
and the paging register (again a '670 I think), thus giving a separate 
regsiter for each channel.
[...]

> The 8089 was pretty much of a dead-end product; limited to 20 bits of 
> addressability, expensive, with only 2 DMA channels.  I never did 

IMHO the only reason it was limited to 20 bits of address was that it was 
designed to be used with the 8086/8088 (also 20 bit address). Had the 
8089 become widly used (read : had IBM used it in the PC), you can bet 
there'd have een am 80289, 80389, etc.

-tony