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They were the first company with the latop as you know it. (Apple is responsible for a whole lot of 'as you know it's, not technical firsts)

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.

Nope. The Powerbook 100 was introduced in late 1991. PC notebooks in the modern clamshell design were showing up as early as 1988. The one I remember best was a Sager 286 model. I noticed they were local to me, so I dropped by their offices and requested to see one (it retailed for over $5k, I certainly couldn't afford to buy one at the time). They brought one out and I got to touch and play with it - a glimpse of what the future held. They were so proud of it, giving me a little spiel about how they were going to upgrade it with a 16 MHz 386SX processor in a few months. They insisted on calling it a notebook, to distinguish it from the clunky laptop computers like the old Compaq Portable and Osborne.

By 1990, the notebook form factor had gained enough traction that Intel announced the 386SL - a low power version of the 80386 made specifically for laptops. They weren't able to churn them out until the following year, but that should demonstrate that the notebook market was thriving long before Apple ever showed up to the game.

I'm starting to wear this phrase out, but: Just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean that they invented it. (To be fair, Apple's big contribution to the form factor was the trackball, then the trackpad. Before then, you had to plug in a mouse if you were going to use it outside of DOS. One laptop had a marble trackball off by the side. The Powerbook was the first with a huge trackball smack dab in the middle.)

They were the first company with the latop as you know it. (Apple is responsible for a whole lot of 'as you know it's, not technical firsts)

There were lots of portable computers but nothing like the old 100. It was the first computer that was a true analog to it's desktop counterpart in the now familiar truely portable clamshell formfactor.

Nope. The Powerbook 100 was introduced in late 1991. PC notebooks in the modern clamshell design were showing up as early as 1988. The one I remember best was a Sager 286 model. I noticed they were local to me, so I dropped by their offices and requested to see one (it retailed for over $5k, I certainly couldn't afford to buy one at the time). They brought one out and I got to touch and play with it - a glimpse of what the future held. They were so proud of it, giving me a little spiel about how they were going to upgrade it with a 16 MHz 386SX processor in a few months. They insisted on calling it a notebook, to distinguish it from the clunky laptop computers like the old Compaq Portable and Osborne.

By 1990, the notebook form factor had gained enough traction that Intel announced the 386SL - a low power version of the 80386 made specifically for laptops. They weren't able to churn them out until the following year, but that should demonstrate that the notebook market was thriving long before Apple ever showed up to the game.

I'm starting to wear this phrase out, but: Just because the first time you saw something was on an Apple product, doesn't mean that they invented it. (To be fair, Apple's big contribution to the form factor was the trackball, then the trackpad. Before then, you had to plug in a mouse if you were going to use it outside of DOS. One laptop had a marble trackball off by the side. The Powerbook was the first with a huge trackball smack dab in the middle.)

The i860 and the i960 were entirely different chips.

Famously, the i860 was described as a Cray on a chip

The i860 and the i960 were entirely different chips.

Famously, the i860 was described as a Cray on a chip

The math coprocessor didn't even exist yet when the 386DX (originally just called the 386) was launched.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by this, but math coprocessors did exist a long time before 386 was published - back to 8087 (published in 1980, it seems), and others even well before that (ISTR there was an coprocessor from AMD available for either i8080 or Z80).

In the strict sense you're correct in that that 387 was released approx one year after 386, so early 386 boards were built with sockets for 287 coprocessor.

Source: cpu-collection.de

everyone knows it's easy to slip backdoors into hardware, but hiding it is the hard part. every fabless chip maker does spot checks of their products and will find these backdoors. at the very least they will find that the shipping products aren't like the ones they designed with extra circuits.

As per this quite old story, hiding malicious circuitry is easy enough that there are serious concerns about it. A moment's thought will reassure you that Moore's law works against us. The intel i5 has 774 million transistors, enough that a significant number of them are simply 'rounded off' when talking about them. The intel 286 had 134,000 transistors, again likely rounded off. So even with back-of-the-envelope calculations a more-than-enough-for-bad-things 286 is capable of being 'lost in the noise' of a modern CPU.

But let's be fair, that is just a transistor count. How many would be required to perform a malicious function? Ideally they would be situated in specific spaces where data across a bus is a constant, perhaps in a cache or in one of the MULTITUDE of pipelines in a CPU/GPU. You need to match a specific pattern, and substitute a new one. One possibility is a LSFR that is checked against some serial bus over and over until the bitstream matches exactly. Based on some totally reliable random internet post, building an LSFR should cost far less than 1000 transistors. I have no electronics background, so that factor is probably off by at least an order of magnitude.

So are you gonna find 1000 transistors in the middle of a few hundred million?

How much MHz do you think THIS thing has:

http://www.cpu-collection.de/?l0=i&i=1684&s=big&tb=1&n=

Intel already tried this on the Pentium processors, see here or here or here I would post more, but google is a great resource

Werent the first co-processors FPUs. Arent they now integrated into the CPU?

The Intel 8086 had the Intel 8087
A whole collection of Intel FPU's is at Intel FPU's

TI's TMS34020 (a programmable 2D rasterisation chip), had the TMS34082 coprocessor (capable of vector/matrix operations)
(Some pictures here. Up to four coprocessors could be used.

Now, both of these form the basis of a current day CPU and GPU (vertex/geometry/pixel shader units).

Here's a processor that only has 16 pins...

I am sure Intel have given a great deal of thought to this, and in a few years saying D 860 or whatever will be completely natural.

They've been there with that number using the i860, which was a high-performance RISC processor designed for graphics, and reused that number (i860) for a Intel XEON motherboard control chipset.

CPU Collection has a complete list of Intel chip classes:

4004, 4040, 8008, 8080, 8085, 8086, 8088, 80186, 80188, 80286
i386 DX, i386 SX, i386 EX, i386 SL, i486 DX, i486 SX, i486 SL, i486 OverDrive
Pentium P5, Pentium P54C, Pentium MMX, Pentium OverDrive, Pentium Pro, Pentium II
P II Celeron, P II Xeon, P II OverDrive, Pentium III, P III Celeron, P III Xeon
FPU, StrongARM, i860, i960, MCS-48

To me, something like 'iXXXXX' is more recognisable than something like P II OverDrive.

Dresden was called the saxony silicon valley aready during the 80s. Famous products have been chips for a PDP 11 clone and the very popolar Z80 clone U880 which was the CPU of all east block home computers.

Dresden was called the saxony silicon valley aready during the 80s. Famous products have been chips for a PDP 11 clone and the very popolar Z80 clone U880 which was the CPU of all east block home computers.

You're still talking about a 68000, a chip introduced in 1979 and whose lineup maxes out at 16 mhz with no likelyhood of ever going higher. A low-powered arm would be a far more modern and powerful choice. In addition, a GB of ram these days costs 100 dollars. 256 MB of Compact Flash costs 20 bucks.

The HP calculators are generally more powerful, though they have stagnated too, but they're bloody impossible to use. HP's odd notation is not something to be taken lightly.

TI has long included 3D as a function in its calculators, so obviously there is some demand there. When working with 3 Dimensional graphing in college, I had to pull out my laptop and use Apple's built-in graphing calculator because my 200 dollar TI-92+ would choke on it. TI also includes the useful ability to graph multiple functions on top of eachother, but provides no clear way to tell them apart. Again, color would be useful here.

My old Clie which I use constantly can go for months between charges, has 16 MB of ram, a 16 MHz 68000, a greyscale display, and I bought it for 50 dollars. And it's positively antiquated compared to the Full-color clie I bought my girlfriend with a 400 MHz Arm and 32 MB ram with a Compact Flash card slot for LESS than the cost of the v200.

My point is not that the calculators are useless, my point is that they are taking a years-old design that rightfully should cost about 20 bucks and making a fortune on markup. They're doing the bare minimum required to stay in the game, when they could be doing far, far better for their customers.

The calculator racket is due for a shakeup, and soon. Nobody can rest on their haunches to the degree that TI has and expect to stay on top... If for no other reason than technology has passed them by.

Nope, AMD had an 8080 compatible chip is 1974 as seen here.