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MBCookyesterday at 9:37 PM1 replyview on HN

Did the minicomputers of the time have MMUs?

I thought UsagiElectric showed a case where his Centurion didn’t, but I may be misremembering.


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McGlockenshireyesterday at 10:35 PM

In fact the 9900 itself was used in an entire line of minicomputers that included a hardware memory map.

The 9900 is a single chip implementation of the CPU board in the TI 990. They even created a dedicated memory mapper chip to go along with the product line, though it is significantly different than the one in the minicomputer line.

(edit: the 990 was first built in the early 70s, memory mappers are quite old conceptually)

(edit 2: in fact the necessity of using a memory mapper is what killed the platform, and was one of the things that made the IBM PC team decline the 9900.)

Unfortunately I don't think that there is a reasonable way to perform real hardware-level memory protection with that chip alone. I'm working on a project documenting the genesis of the 99000 chips, which include a privilege bit in the status register, from the minicomputer line.

Essay forthcoming, and probably an OS. Maybe a year...

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