-=> Quoting Roy J. Tellason to George White <=-

 SD> OK, how many people you know that have a 80186?  I know my
 
 GW> Me! :-)
 GW> They are the CPU on intelligent comms cards I use.
 GW> The 80186 was specifically targeted at embedded systems. The
 GW> integrated peripherals are not generally suitable for the
 GW> standard PC architecture so you'll rarely find it except in
 GW> embedded systems. 

 RJT> Actually,  the reason for that,  as I understand it,  is the fact that
 RJT> although Intel specified that certain interrupts were "reserved" for
 RJT> the original 8086 and 8088 chips IBM went ahead and used them anyway, 
 RJT> making it darn near impossible to use the '186 (and '188) chips in any
 RJT> sort of pc clone hardware. 

Since the 286 has the exact same problem, it's *not* as big of a hassle
as it seems. It *is* a pain, but it can be worked around most of the
time. 

 RJT> There was one machine out that used one of these,  as I recall -- the
 RJT> Tandy 2000.  But it never did sell all that well,  and I don't know
 RJT> how "compatible" it was. 

The Tandy 2000 was released about the same time as the Dec Rainbow, and
the Sanyo 555. All three are 100% MS-DOS compatible, only somewhat BIOS
compatible, and not very compatible at all at the hardware level. 

At the time no one knew that "hardware compatible" was going to be the
decision of the market place. And BIOS level compatability risked
copyright lawsuits (this was before Phoenix came out with the first
*legal* clone of the PC BIOS).

The 2000 has some nice features, such as using USARTs instead of UARTs
on the COM ports. And 640x400 graphics (2 color or 16 color depending
on monitor and RAM installed on the graphics board)

I've "inherited" 3 of them, one with a HD. At some point I'm going to
get one set up and running BBS software or some such. If I get *really*
ambitious, I'll try porting DR-DOS to it (I've got assemblers and
several compilers for the 2000).


--- Blue Wave/DOS v2.30
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