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Re: F21c


>>>>> "Penio" == Penio Penev <penev@venezia.rockefeller.edu> writes:

    Penio> It you have a tight enough
    Penio> multitasking loop, you can guarantee that a certain code
    Penio> will be executed no later than a certain time it was
    Penio> previously executed.  Then you can treat this as a "clock
    Penio> interrupt".  Even more, you can think of it as an
    Penio> "interrupt" in general -- you can attach whatever I/O
    Penio> polling code you want there.

    Penio> Strobing needs a timer, that's true.  This is what the
    Penio> analog and/or video coprocessors are about.

    Penio> I was refering more to asynchronos (but time-critical) I/O
    Penio> events and multitasking.  For those one does not need a
    Penio> timer.

Yes, I remember the old Datapoint machines back in the 70s.  They only
had a single interrupt, which was the timer.  The used the timer to
drive an ISR that polled everything else.  They ran multitasking and
ARCnet that way, and it worked great.  It was really quite amazing.

That company is truley the inventor of the personal computer, and
indeed, they were the architects of the 8008, which they contracted
with intel to put into silicon.

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