The LTE is a line of notebook-sized laptops manufactured by Compaq Computer Corporation , introduced in 1989 and discontinued in 1997. It was the first notebook computer sold by Compaq and the first commercially successful notebook that was compatible with the IBM PC .
85-628: Development of the LTE line began in 1986; the company conceived it as their first attempt at a truly lightweight portable computer, aiming to replace their Portable and SLT lines. The first two models in the LTE line—the LTE and LTE/286 —competed with other notebook computers such as NEC 's UltraLite and Zenith 's MinisPort . However, whereas the UltraLite and MinisPort failed to gain much uptake due to their novel but nonstandard data storage technologies,
170-926: A second source for manufacturing of the entire systems. Citizen later became its sole manufacturer. Meanwhile, Compaq purchased the monochrome active -matrix panels used in the Lite/25E and Lite 4/25E from Hosiden . Production of the LTE Lite was again moved from Citizen in Japan to Compaq's overseas plant in Singapore in 1994—Compaq citing wanting to fill vacant production lines in that plant, which also manufactured its Contura line of budget notebooks. The LTE Lite sold very well and quickly became Compaq's flagship mobile computer, overtaking sales of their earlier luggable portables. The LTE Elite series, released in March 1994,
255-434: A 20-MB hard drive, or no hard drive. The LTE and LTE/286 feature monochrome LCD screens manufactured by Citizen Watch. The LCD measures 7.7 inches wide by 3.7 inches tall and is capable of displaying CGA graphics in four shades of gray. The screens contain a blue electroluminescent backlight, allowing users to read off the laptops in low-light conditions. The LTE sports an 80C86 clocked at 9.54 MHz, while
340-515: A contract with Citizen to allow the latter to manufacture models of the LTE and LTE/286 for distribution in certain territories. This was the first time that Citizen, primarily a manufacture of timepieces and precision electronics, had manufactured an entire computer system. In October 1990 the company unveiled the LTE/386s, featuring the Intel 386SX processor clocked at 20 MHz. The stock memory
425-500: A full-feature docking station that added several other MultiBay units to the machine, on top of additional PC Cards and an Ethernet port . The LTE 5000 series also abandoned the monitor-mounted trackballs of older models in favor of an implementation of IBM 's keyboard-mounted pointing stick technology. Because of the disappointing performance of the LTE Elite, Compaq hired Inventec of Taiwan to co-design and manufacture in full
510-430: A fully static CMOS version for battery powered devices, manufactured using Intel's CHMOS processes. The original chip measured 33 mm² and minimum feature size was 3.2 μm. The MUL and DIV instructions were very slow due to being microcoded so x86 programmers usually just used the bit shift instructions for multiplying and dividing instead. The 8086 was die-shrunk to 2 μm in 1981; this version also corrected
595-436: A mathematical coprocessor to add hardware/microcode-based floating-point performance. The Intel 8087 was the standard math coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088, operating on 80-bit numbers. Manufacturers like Cyrix (8087-compatible) and Weitek ( not 8087-compatible) eventually came up with high-performance floating-point coprocessors that competed with the 8087. The clock frequency was originally limited to 5 MHz, but
680-403: A pair of full-length, 16-bit ISA slots to the machine and two 5.25-inch drive bays. Compaq shipped their docking station with a VGA monitor and a standard desktop keyboard. The docking station connected to the back of the LTE/386s via a new specialized connector on the rear of the laptop. Compaq also sold an internal CD-ROM adapter for the LTE/386s that fits into its modem expansion slot, allowing
765-411: A program small enough to fit in one segment. Far pointers are 32-bit segment:offset pairs resolving to 20-bit external addresses. Some compilers also support huge pointers, which are like far pointers except that pointer arithmetic on a huge pointer treats it as a linear 20-bit pointer, while pointer arithmetic on a far pointer wraps around within its 16-bit offset without touching the segment part of
850-574: A proportional shrinkage in Compaq's laptop market share, despite the company's total market share slightly increasing from 1993. In 1994, Toshiba overtook Compaq as the top manufacturer of laptops in the United States, helped along with their Satellite line of laptops. The LTE 5000 series, released in September 1995, was a top-to-bottom redesign. The last in the LTE line, the LTE 5000 series
935-535: A revolution in mobile computing . It was a direct influence on both Apple and IBM for the development of their own notebook computers. The first generation of LTE gave way to succeeding lines, including the LTE Lite in 1992, the LTE Elite in 1994, and the LTE 5000 series in 1995, all of which received mostly positive reviews. Compaq sold over two million units across the LTE's lifespan. They succeeded it with
SECTION 10
#17327795577251020-591: A single ALU cycle (instead of two, via internal carry, as in the 8080 and 8085), speeding up such instructions considerably. Combined with orthogonalizations of operations versus operand types and addressing modes , as well as other enhancements, this made the performance gain over the 8080 or 8085 fairly significant, despite cases where the older chips may be faster (see below). As can be seen from these tables, operations on registers and immediates were fast (between 2 and 4 cycles), while memory-operand instructions and jumps were quite slow; jumps took more cycles than on
1105-457: A single segment, just as in most 8-bit based processors, and can be used to build .com files for instance. Precompiled libraries often come in several versions compiled for different memory models. According to Morse et al.,. the designers actually contemplated using an 8-bit shift (instead of 4-bit), in order to create a 16 MB physical address space. However, as this would have forced segments to begin on 256-byte boundaries, and 1 MB
1190-542: A small 18-pin "memory package", which ruled out the use of a separate address bus (Intel was primarily a DRAM manufacturer at the time). Two years later, Intel launched the 8080 , employing the new 40-pin DIL packages originally developed for calculator ICs to enable a separate address bus. It had an extended instruction set that is source-compatible (not binary compatible ) with the 8008 and also included some 16-bit instructions to make programming easier. The 8080 device
1275-423: A small program (less than 64 KB) can be loaded starting at a fixed offset (such as 0000) in its own segment, avoiding the need for relocation , with at most 15 bytes of alignment waste. Compilers for the 8086 family commonly support two types of pointer , near and far . Near pointers are 16-bit offsets implicitly associated with the program's code or data segment and so can be used only within parts of
1360-422: A stack register bug in the original 3.5 μm chips. Later 1.5 μm and CMOS variants were outsourced to other manufacturers and not developed in-house. The architecture was defined by Stephen P. Morse with some help from Bruce Ravenel (the architect of the 8087) in refining the final revisions. Logic designer Jim McKevitt and John Bayliss were the lead engineers of the hardware-level development team and Bill Pohlman
1445-675: Is assumed, specifically, that the DS and ES segments address the same region of memory. Although partly shadowed by other design choices in this particular chip, the multiplexed address and data buses limit performance slightly; transfers of 16-bit or 8-bit quantities are done in a four-clock memory access cycle, which is faster on 16-bit, although slower on 8-bit quantities, compared to many contemporary 8-bit based CPUs. As instructions vary from one to six bytes, fetch and execution are made concurrent and decoupled into separate units (as it remains in today's x86 processors): The bus interface unit feeds
1530-453: Is copied one byte (8-bit character) at a time. The example code uses the BP (base pointer) register to establish a call frame , an area on the stack that contains all of the parameters and local variables for the execution of the subroutine. This kind of calling convention supports reentrant and recursive code and has been used by Algol-like languages since the late 1950s. A flat memory model
1615-527: Is instantly apparent ... the Elite is more convenient to carry than some of the so-called subnotebooks". Multiple reviewers also judged the battery life of the LTE Elite an improvement over the LTE Lite. Some considered the LTE Elite too expensive on launch. The LTE 5000 series' redesigned chassis and added multimedia capabilities received high marks. Dwight Silverman of the Houston Chronicle dubbed
1700-425: Is limited to 64 KB, simply because internal address/index registers are only 16 bits wide. Programming over 64 KB memory boundaries involves adjusting the segment registers (see below); this difficulty existed until the 80386 architecture introduced wider (32-bit) registers (the memory management hardware in the 80286 did not help in this regard, as its registers are still only 16 bits wide). Some of
1785-476: Is supported in hardware ; 16-bit words are pushed onto the stack, and the top of the stack is pointed to by SS:SP. There are 256 interrupts , which can be invoked by both hardware and software. The interrupts can cascade, using the stack to store the return addresses . The 8086 has 64 K of 8-bit (or alternatively 32 K of 16-bit word) I/O port space. The 8086 has a 16-bit flags register . Nine of these condition code flags are active, and indicate
SECTION 20
#17327795577251870-515: Is that the 8086 also introduced some new instructions (not present in the 8080 and 8085) to better support stack-based high-level programming languages such as Pascal and PL/M ; some of the more useful instructions are push mem-op , and ret size , supporting the "Pascal calling convention " directly. (Several others, such as push immed and enter , were added in the subsequent 80186, 80286, and 80386 processors.) A 64 KB (one segment) stack growing towards lower addresses
1955-479: The ALGOL -family of languages, including Pascal and PL/M . According to principal architect Stephen P. Morse , this was a result of a more software-centric approach. Other enhancements included microcode instructions for the multiply and divide assembly language instructions. Designers also anticipated coprocessors , such as 8087 and 8089 , so the bus structure was designed to be flexible. The first revision of
2040-627: The Armada line in 1997. The concept for the LTE line was originally drafted for Compaq in 1986 by Christopher J. Gintz, who was director of technical and planning development for the company at the time. Between this time and the unveiling of the LTE in October 1989, Compaq released the Portable 386 in 1987, another entry in Compaq's long line of portable computers that were compatible with IBM 's Personal Computer platform. In 1988, they released
2125-583: The SLT/286 , Compaq's first ever laptop . The notebook computer emerged as a size category of portable computer starting with Epson 's HX-20 in 1982. It was further popularized by Radio Shack 's TRS-80 Model 100 in 1983. In terms of footprint, these notebooks measured roughly the size of a sheet of ANSI Letter paper—8.5 by 11 inches (215.9 by 279.4 mm)—making them easy to slip into an average-sized briefcase , and were relatively lightweight, making them easy to lift with one hand. The first notebook on
2210-517: The backlight inverter of successor models with a higher-voltage unit in response to this criticism. Compaq began retiring the LTE line with the 5000 series after introducing the Armada line in 1996. The final LTE 5000 models rolled off the line in the middle of June 1997. The Armada series marked the return of Compaq manufacturing their own laptops; following the end of the LTE 5000 series, Compaq severed ties with Inventec. Compaq Portable series Too Many Requests If you report this error to
2295-488: The "16-bit microprocessor" identity of the 8086. A 20-bit external address bus provides a 1 MiB physical address space (2 = 1,048,576 x 1 byte ). This address space is addressed by means of internal memory "segmentation". The data bus is multiplexed with the address bus in order to fit all of the control lines into a standard 40-pin dual in-line package . It provides a 16-bit I/O address bus, supporting 64 KB of separate I/O space. The maximum linear address space
2380-597: The 1998–1999 Lunar Prospector . For the packaging, the Intel 8086 was available both in ceramic and plastic DIP packages. Compatible—and, in many cases, enhanced—versions were manufactured by Fujitsu , Harris / Intersil , OKI , Siemens , Texas Instruments , NEC , Mitsubishi , and AMD . For example, the NEC V20 and NEC V30 pair were hardware-compatible with the 8088 and 8086 even though NEC made original Intel clones μPD8088D and μPD8086D respectively, but incorporated
2465-484: The 40th anniversary of the Intel 8086, called the Intel Core i7-8086K . In 1972, Intel launched the 8008 , Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor. It implemented an instruction set designed by Datapoint Corporation with programmable CRT terminals in mind, which also proved to be fairly general-purpose. The device needed several additional ICs to produce a functional computer, in part due to it being packaged in
2550-464: The 8086 itself. The 8086 has eight more-or-less general 16-bit registers (including the stack pointer but excluding the instruction pointer, flag register and segment registers). Four of them, AX, BX, CX, DX, can also be accessed as 8-bit register pairs (see figure) while the other four, SI, DI, BP, SP, are 16-bit only. Due to a compact encoding inspired by 8-bit processors, most instructions are one-address or two-address operations, which means that
2635-631: The 8086 through both industrial espionage and reverse engineering . The resulting chip, K1810VM86 , was binary and pin-compatible with the 8086. i8086 and i8088 were respectively the cores of the Soviet-made PC-compatible EC1831 and EC1832 desktops. (EC1831 is the EC identification of IZOT 1036C and EC1832 is the EC identification of IZOT 1037C, developed and manufactured in Bulgaria. EC stands for Единая Система.) However,
Compaq LTE - Misplaced Pages Continue
2720-457: The LTE 5000 series. The partnership not only hastened development of a successor but also gained Compaq access to Taiwan's more cutting-edge technologies in the field of mobile computer production. It was the first time in several years that Compaq relied on an outside company to design a portable computer of theirs and was the first machine Compaq had manufactured entirely in Taiwan. The LTE range
2805-474: The LTE Elite into a rectangular, VCR -like slot, allowing the laptop to be used like a desktop computer, with an external monitor perched on top of the docking station. The SmartStation added two 5.25-inch drive bays, two ISA slots for IBM PC –compatible expansion cards, SCSI-2 ports for parallel peripherals and external storage, and Ethernet ports for networking. The MiniStation/EN and MiniStation/TR meanwhile were simple port replicators adding one of each of
2890-401: The LTE Elite was the ability of its processors to be upgraded and replaced, owing to its use of a socket rather than a soldered-on surface-mount package typical of laptops in the mid-1990s. The laptops' hard drives are also easily removable by the end user with the press of a button and can also be locked into the chassis with a security tab built into the drive's caddy. The LTE Elite retained
2975-563: The LTE line was a major factor in the development of notebook computers at both Apple and IBM . Apple released their first laptop, the Macintosh Portable , in September 1989—a little over a month before the LTE debuted. While in development longer than the LTE and with a far larger sales backlog, the LTE outperformed the Macintosh Portable in the marketplace by an order of magnitude due to customer preference for
3060-486: The LTE succeeded on account of its use of the conventional floppy drive and spinning hard drive, allowing users to transfer data to and from their desktop computers without any hassle. As well, Compaq began offering docking stations with the release of the LTE/386s in 1990, providing performance comparable to then-current desktop machines. The first LTEs received glowing praise among technology reviewers, who saw it as
3145-610: The LTE's smaller footprint and lower weight. In response, Apple developed what would become the PowerBook in 1990. Likewise, the LTE also spurred IBM to rush the development of a smaller laptop to compete with Compaq. This initiative eventually bore the PS/2 Model L40 SX in 1991—a predecessor to the ThinkPad line. The first generation of LTE received glowing praise in the computing press, where multiple reviewers dubbed
3230-721: The LTE/286 is based on the 80C286 clocked at 12 MHz. Both are respectively CMOS versions of Intel's 8086 and 80286 processors, intended for low-power applications such as battery-powered portable computers. The LTE and LTE/286 are equipped with 640 KB of internal RAM, expandable to 1.6 MB (for the LTE) or 2.6 MB (for the LTE/286) of RAM with the use of the use of 1- and 2-MB proprietary RAM cards that were sold by Compaq. The Compaq LTE and LTE/286 were primarily manufactured by Compaq at their Houston campus. Compaq later signed
3315-451: The LTE/386s made heavy use of rigid-flex interconnects between the different printed circuit boards , as well as custom ASICs , in order to save weight and reduce the amount of fragile wires and cables. Furthermore, the LTE/386s was the first of Compaq's laptops to use Conner's portable-oriented hard drives, whose platter diameters measured 2.5 inches across as opposed to 3.5 inches across. The LTE Lite, released in 1992, improved
3400-486: The Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request from 172.68.168.237 via cp1104 cp1104, Varnish XID 209620864 Upstream caches: cp1104 int Error: 429, Too Many Requests at Thu, 28 Nov 2024 07:39:17 GMT Intel 8086 The 8086 (also called iAPX 86 ) is a 16-bit microprocessor chip designed by Intel between early 1976 and June 8, 1978, when it
3485-498: The address. To avoid the need to specify near and far on numerous pointers, data structures, and functions, compilers also support "memory models" which specify default pointer sizes. The tiny (max 64K), small (max 128K), compact (data > 64K), medium (code > 64K), large (code,data > 64K), and huge (individual arrays > 64K) models cover practical combinations of near, far, and huge pointers for code and data. The tiny model means that code and data are shared in
Compaq LTE - Misplaced Pages Continue
3570-476: The aforementioned SCSI-2 ports and networking ports. The MiniStation/EN provided a Ethernet port, while the MiniStation/TR provided a Token Ring port. The OptiByte Media Station, meanwhile, was the most expensive but added a 16-bit sound card, a double-speed CD-ROM drive and built-in speakers, as well as providing a free ISA slot. This added sound synthesis capability to an otherwise silent laptop (barring
3655-469: The ambitious internal AC adapter of the Elite line in favor of the familiar power brick. In its stead was what Compaq termed the MultiBay : a multipurpose, hot-swappable expansion slot in the front of the machine that allowed users to slot in a floppy drive, a CD-ROM drive (a first for the LTE line), a second hard drive for more disk storage, or a second battery for frequent travelers. Compaq also offered
3740-474: The battery life and quality of its predecessors' LCD panels while reducing weight. The LTE Lite/20 and LTE Lite/25 introduced suspend and hibernation modes, as well as a BIOS password and a Kensington slot for added security. Starting with the LTE Lite/25C and LTE Lite/25E, a trackball was built into the display housing on the right side, with the left- and right-click buttons on the reverse side of
3825-584: The built-in trackball of the LTE Lite. The LTE Elite series was manufactured in large part in Compaq's facility in Singapore. Certain surface-mount PCBs were manufactured in Compaq's factory in Erskine , while final assembly of each LTE Elite was completed in Houston . The LTE Elite line was plauged with manufacturing issues and technical faults, leading to several recalls. These factors and more contributed to
3910-604: The computer to be used with an optional external CD-ROM drive, making it one of the first laptops to natively support CD-ROM. Compaq introduced four new docking stations for the LTE Elite line: the SmartStation, the MiniStation/EN, the MiniStation/TR, and the OptiByte Media Station. The SmartStation was the second-most-expensive and feature-packed; like Apple 's Duo Dock , the SmartStation loaded
3995-457: The control pins, which carry essential signals for all external operations, have more than one function depending upon whether the device is operated in min or max mode. The former mode is intended for small single-processor systems, while the latter is for medium or large systems using more than one processor (a kind of multiprocessor mode). Maximum mode is required when using an 8087 or 8089 coprocessor. The voltage on pin 33 (MN/ MX ) determines
4080-483: The current state of the processor: Carry flag (CF), Parity flag (PF), Auxiliary carry flag (AF), Zero flag (ZF), Sign flag (SF), Trap flag (TF), Interrupt flag (IF), Direction flag (DF), and Overflow flag (OF). Also referred to as the status word, the layout of the flags register is as follows: There are also four 16-bit segment registers (see figure) that allow the 8086 CPU to access one megabyte of memory in an unusual way. Rather than concatenating
4165-400: The desktop drives of its day. This allowed Compaq to fit a spinning hard drive within the confines of the notebook-sized computer. Compaq offered the baseline, 8086 -equipped LTE with either an internal 20-MB Conner hard drive or no hard drive at all (while still possessing a floppy drive). On the other hand, Compaq offered users the option to buy the 286 -based LTE/286 with a 40-MB hard drive,
4250-489: The equivalence of different segment:offset pairs. In practice the use of "huge" pointers and similar mechanisms was widespread and the flat 32-bit addressing made possible with the 32-bit offset registers in the 80386 eventually extended the limited addressing range in a more general way. The instruction stream is fetched from memory as words and is addressed internally by the processor to the byte level as necessary. An instruction stream queuing mechanism allows up to 6 bytes of
4335-505: The forthcoming Windows 95 . VLSI Technology , whose largest customer at the time was Compaq, worked closely with the latter to design the PC Card controller ASIC. The LTE Elite also integrated the AC adapter into the main body of the laptop, eliminating the need for an external power brick . This was the first time this approach had been done in a notebook-sized computer. Another new feature of
SECTION 50
#17327795577254420-617: The housing. The LTE Lite/20 and LTE Lite/25 used Intel's low-powered, portable-specific 80386SL processor. The LTE Lite 4/25, announced in November 1992, was the first laptop to feature Intel's later portable-specific i486SL . Manufacturing of the LTE Lites was initially performed at Compaq's plant in Houston, Texas. As with the preceding LTEs, Compaq used Citizen Watch of Japan as manufacturer for its monochrome passive-matrix LCDs and as
4505-420: The instruction set and high level architecture was ready after about three months, and as almost no CAD tools were used, four engineers and 12 layout people were simultaneously working on the chip. The 8086 took a little more than two years from idea to working product, which was considered fast for a complex design in the 1970s. The 8086 was sequenced using a mixture of random logic and microcode and
4590-523: The instruction set of the 80186 along with some (but not all) of the 80186 speed enhancements, providing a drop-in capability to upgrade both instruction set and processing speed without manufacturers having to modify their designs. Such relatively simple and low-power 8086-compatible processors in CMOS are still used in embedded systems. The electronics industry of the Soviet Union was able to replicate
4675-517: The instruction stream to be queued while waiting for decoding and execution. The queue acts as a First-In-First-Out (FIFO) buffer, from which the Execution Unit (EU) extracts instruction bytes as required. Whenever there is space for at least two bytes in the queue, the BIU will attempt a word fetch memory cycle. If the queue is empty (following a branch instruction, for example), the first byte into
4760-452: The instruction stream to the execution unit through a 6-byte prefetch queue (a form of loosely coupled pipelining ), speeding up operations on registers and immediates , while memory operations became slower (four years later, this performance problem was fixed with the 80186 and 80286 ). However, the full (instead of partial) 16-bit architecture with a full width ALU meant that 16-bit arithmetic instructions could now be performed with
4845-463: The internal PC speaker). The OptiByte Media Station was designed and manufactured by AccuMem Systems and resold by Compaq. The LTE was the first commercially successful IBM PC–compatible notebook computer and helped jump-start the burgeoning notebook industry. Compaq was helped in no small part by their decision to incorporate both a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and a conventional spinning hard disk drives on higher-end models—data storage mediums that
4930-436: The lack of an internal floppy drive. Zenith Data Systems ' notebook-sized MinisPort , released slightly after the UltraLite in 1989, did little to ameliorate this issue despite offering an internal floppy drive due to its non-standard, 2-inch format. The LTE and LTE/286, released in October 1989, were true notebooks, each occupying exactly the footprint of ANSI Letter paper while measuring 1.9 inches (48 mm) thick. The LTE
5015-520: The last versions in HMOS were specified for 10 MHz. HMOS-III and CMOS versions were manufactured for a long time (at least a while into the 1990s) for embedded systems , although its successor, the 80186 / 80188 (which includes some on-chip peripherals), has been more popular for embedded use. The 80C86, the CMOS version of the 8086, was used in the GRiDPad , Toshiba T1200 , HP 110 , and finally
5100-466: The lineup received generally positive reviews from the technology press, with PC World writing that the LTE Elites "push[ed] beyond the basic requirements of mobile computing" and "move[d] the mobile computing standard forward". Critics generally appreciated the convenience of the integrated AC adapter, with PC Week writing that "the convenience of carrying just the notebook and small power cord
5185-412: The machines "an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to computer design [that] virtually bludgeons the competition with a mass of features". Many reviewers found the active-matrix LCDs of the higher-end models uncharacteristically dim, due to Compaq coating their polarizers with a dark film intended to increase contrast when looked at straight-on while reducing visibility from far angles. Compaq replaced
SECTION 60
#17327795577255270-410: The machines breakthroughs in mobile computing . Mitt Jones of PC Magazine called the LTE and LTE/286, "without reservation, the most exciting and usable laptops on the market", albeit expensive at launch. Of the 80C86-based LTE, Jones wrote called the machine "somewhat miraculous ... In the same way the UltraLite seemed impossible for its size [in 1988], the LTE seems impossible now". Fredric Burke of
5355-613: The majority of customers using desktop computers had built their entire computing ecosystem around by that point in 1989. From its introduction in 1989 to its discontiuation in 1997, Compaq sold over two million units of the entire LTE lineup, generating over US$ 1.5 billion in revenue for the company. The company sold the first 100,000 units of the LTE in December 1990. The LTE Lite in particular sold very well for Compaq, Citizen manufacturing between 20,000 and 25,000 LTE Lite units each month between 1992 and 1993. The unexpected success of
5440-580: The manager for the project. The legacy of the 8086 is enduring in the basic instruction set of today's personal computers and servers; the 8086 also lent its last two digits to later extended versions of the design, such as the Intel 286 and the Intel 386 , all of which eventually became known as the x86 family. (Another reference is that the PCI Vendor ID for Intel devices is 8086 h .) All internal registers, as well as internal and external data buses, are 16 bits wide, which firmly established
5525-486: The market compatible with the IBM PC was NEC 's UltraLite in 1988. Weighing in at 4.4 pounds (2.0 kg), the UltraLite eschewed from conventional floppy and hard disk drives for software and data storage, in favor of proprietary ROM and RAM cards. This approach was technically impressive but led to slow adoption rates by consumers due to the difficulty of transferring data to and from IBM PCs and compatibles because of
5610-448: The mode. Changing the state of pin 33 changes the function of certain other pins, most of which have to do with how the CPU handles the (local) bus. The mode is usually hardwired into the circuit and therefore cannot be changed by software. The workings of these modes are described in terms of timing diagrams in Intel datasheets and manuals. In minimum mode, all control signals are generated by
5695-479: The queue immediately becomes available to the EU. Small programs could ignore the segmentation and just use plain 16-bit addressing. This allows 8-bit software to be quite easily ported to the 8086. The authors of most DOS implementations took advantage of this by providing an Application Programming Interface very similar to CP/M as well as including the simple .com executable file format, identical to CP/M. This
5780-441: The result is stored in one of the operands. At most one of the operands can be in memory, but this memory operand can also be the destination , while the other operand, the source , can be either register or immediate . A single memory location can also often be used as both source and destination which, among other factors, further contributes to a code density comparable to (and often better than) most eight-bit machines at
5865-515: The same publication, reviewing the LTE/286 a year after its release, called it "the class act in its field", praising its expandability, the legibility of the LCD, and the performance of the battery. Both PC Magazine and InfoWorld rated the LTE/386s the fastest 386-class notebook those magazines had reviewed up to that point in early 1991. Critics rated the initial LTE Lites among the top-performing 386 laptops in terms of graphics performance and among
5950-546: The segment register with the address register, as in most processors whose address space exceeds their register size, the 8086 shifts the 16-bit segment only four bits left before adding it to the 16-bit offset (16×segment + offset), therefore producing a 20-bit external (or effective or physical) address from the 32-bit segment:offset pair. As a result, each external address can be referred to by 2 = 4096 different segment:offset pairs. Although considered complicated and cumbersome by many programmers, this scheme also has advantages;
6035-555: The simple 8080 and 8085 , and the 8088 (used in the IBM PC) was additionally hampered by its narrower bus. The reasons why most memory related instructions were slow were threefold: However, memory access performance was drastically enhanced with Intel's next generation of 8086 family CPUs. The 80186 and 80286 both had dedicated address calculation hardware, saving many cycles, and the 80286 also had separate (non-multiplexed) address and data buses. The 8086/8088 could be connected to
6120-452: The time such as the PDP-11 , VAX , 68000 , 32016 , etc. On the other hand, being more regular than the rather minimalistic but ubiquitous 8-bit microprocessors such as the 6502 , 6800 , 6809 , 8085 , MCS-48 , 8051 , and other contemporary accumulator-based machines, it is significantly easier to construct an efficient code generator for the 8086 architecture. Another factor for this
6205-411: The time. The degree of generality of most registers is much greater than in the 8080 or 8085. However, 8086 registers were more specialized than in most contemporary minicomputers and are also used implicitly by some instructions. While perfectly sensible for the assembly programmer, this makes register allocation for compilers more complicated compared to more orthogonal 16-bit and 32-bit processors of
6290-477: The top five of 386 laptops in terms of rendering graphics within Windows. The battery life of these machines received mixed assessments, however, as did the feeling of the keyboard switches and the quality of the passive-matrix LCDs. Reviewers preferred the active-matrix LCDs of the later LTE Lites, which they gave high marks for their greater viewing angles and sharpness. Despite the LTE Elite's technical issues,
6375-516: Was Compaq's first product with slots for PC Cards (known contemporaneously as PCMCIA cards, after the association who founded the card standard). Unlike other vendor's implementation of PC Cards, the LTE Elite's was largely plug and play , allowing cards to be removed and new cards to be inserted without rebooting the machine. Compaq worked closely with Microsoft to develop the necessary support drivers for plug-and-play PC Cards in Windows 3.1 and
6460-453: Was bumped up to 2 MB, expandable to 10 MB, with the same proprietary RAM cards as its predecessor; the number of card slots was increased to two for the LTE/386s. The LTE/386s also replaced the stubbly display panel of the older models with a full-sized, 9-inch-diagonal LCD capable of displaying VGA graphics in sixteen shades of gray, in a return to form from the SLT. The designers behind
6545-436: Was considered very large for a microprocessor around 1976, the idea was dismissed. Also, there were not enough pins available on a low cost 40-pin package for the additional four address bus pins. In principle, the address space of the x86 series could have been extended in later processors by increasing the shift value, as long as applications obtained their segments from the operating system and did not make assumptions about
6630-485: Was eventually replaced by the depletion-load -based 8085 (1977), which used a single +5 V power supply instead of the three different operating voltages of earlier chips. Other well known 8-bit microprocessors that emerged during these years are Motorola 6800 (1974), General Instrument PIC16X (1975), MOS Technology 6502 (1975), Zilog Z80 (1976), and Motorola 6809 (1978). The 8086 project started in May 1976 and
6715-399: Was implemented using depletion-load nMOS circuitry with approximately 20,000 active transistors (29,000 counting all ROM and PLA sites). It was soon moved to a new refined nMOS manufacturing process called HMOS (for High performance MOS) that Intel originally developed for manufacturing of fast static RAM products. This was followed by HMOS-II, HMOS-III versions, and, eventually,
6800-423: Was important when the 8086 and MS-DOS were new, because it allowed many existing CP/M (and other) applications to be quickly made available, greatly easing acceptance of the new platform. The following 8086 assembly source code is for a subroutine named _strtolower that copies a null-terminated ASCIIZ character string from one location to another, converting all alphabetic characters to lower case. The string
6885-425: Was marketed as a desktop replacement ; with its optional docking stations , it allowed peripherals to be permanently connected. The LTE laptop would be simply removed from the docking station to be used on the go and then docked to use in the office. The LTE/386s was the first LTE offered with an optional docking station, allowing the computer to be used more or less like a desktop computer. The docking station added
6970-699: Was originally intended as a temporary substitute for the ambitious and delayed iAPX 432 project. It was an attempt to draw attention from the less-delayed 16-bit and 32-bit processors of other manufacturers — Motorola , Zilog , and National Semiconductor . Whereas the 8086 was a 16-bit microprocessor, it used the same microarchitecture as Intel's 8-bit microprocessors (8008, 8080, and 8085). This allowed assembly language programs written in 8-bit to seamlessly migrate . New instructions and features — such as signed integers, base+offset addressing, and self-repeating operations — were added. Instructions were added to assist source code compilation of nested functions in
7055-428: Was released. The Intel 8088 , released July 1, 1979, is a slightly modified chip with an external 8-bit data bus (allowing the use of cheaper and fewer supporting ICs ), and is notable as the processor used in the original IBM PC design. The 8086 gave rise to the x86 architecture, which eventually became Intel's most successful line of processors. On June 5, 2018, Intel released a limited-edition CPU celebrating
7140-499: Was the debut of Intel 's multimedia-oriented Pentium processor in a Compaq laptop. It was also Compaq's first laptop with built-in 16-bit audio synthesis and playback (beyond the PC speaker ); hardware acceleration for video; and an infrared port for communicating with PDAs . An optional MPEG decoder card also allowed the laptop to stream MPEG video in real-time as well as output video to television sets and projectors. Compaq abandoned
7225-451: Was the first notebook on the market with conventional 3.5-inch floppy disk drives, as well as the first with optional hard disk drives. Compaq sourced their floppy drives from Citizen Watch and their hard drives from Conner Peripherals . Despite the drive's platters measuring 3.5 inches in diameter, as had been typical of desktop computers since the late 1980s, the drive's casing measured 0.75 inches (19 mm) thick—much thinner than
#724275