8088 vs. 80c88

[Chuck Guzis]

On 22 Feb 2009 at 22:17, Allison wrote:

> Your kidding tight?  ;)  
> 
> JRT pascal was fairly buggy itself and it was till arond V3 that it stopped being
> noticalbly so.

Buggy or not, the V20 wouldn't run it.  Rich Naro verified the bug 
and published a MicroNote on it.  And JRT was comparatively popular 
for the time.  It boils down to the V20 not being able to run a 
commercially available 8080 product because of a fault in the CPU.

Suppose a customer used an application written and deployed with JRT 
Pascal.  What do we tell him?  "JRT Pascal--ho, ho, ha, you must be 
kidding...."

Nope, serious business.  Who knows what other product could have used 
the same coding technique?

In a way, this was deja vu of a much earlier problem with the NEC 
version of the 8080, where NEC left the carry bit unaffected after a 
boolean operation, where Intel reset it.  Considering that many 8080 
programs cleared the carry bit with something like "ORA A", do you 
think that CP/M would have run with the old NEC chip?

--Chuck