[Coco] Glenside website (new & old)

[Frank Pittel]

It's always been a bit of a grey area as to whether or not the 6809 was an 8bit
or 16bit. In my mind it based on the size of the accumulator although there can be
a case made for the width of the data bus.

The rest has to do with marketing. :-) I do remember hearing at one time either
Motorola or Tandy (can't remember which) refered to the 6809 and by extension a
16bit machine.

Personally I always thought of the 8088 as being a 8bit CPU.

The Other Frank


On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 03:38:20PM -0400, Aaron Wolfe wrote:
> I've always thought of the group of CPUs that could address 64k
> (directly, without MMU etc) as "8 bit", although I guess that doesn't
> make a ton of sense since thats 16 bit addressing.  The "16 bit" CPUs
> were all (as far as I know) able to address 512k or a megabyte or some
> astoundingly (at the time) large memory space.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 3:07 PM, Bill Loguidice <bill at armchairarcade.com> wrote:
> > "Bitness" it always a tough one because it's not necessarily logically
> > exclusive to the processor, but how the whole system performs, i.e., what
> > type of bottlenecks are present/what the data path is like. The TI-99/4 and
> > TI-99/4a were both technically 16-bit, as was the Mattel Intellivision. I
> > would think though all things considered they'd be put in comfortably with
> > the 8-bit class of systems. The Turbo-Grafx/16 on the other hand is 8-bit,
> > but could be put into the 16-bit class based on some of its comparitive
> > performance factors. Are the Amiga and ST 32-bit or 16-bit? Is the Atari
> > Jaguar 64-bit or 32-bit? Etc. When it's not quite so clear cut, it's open
> > up to debate.
> >


<snip>


> >
> > On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 2:51 PM, Arthur Flexser <flexser at fiu.edu> wrote:
> >
> >> I always wondered why the CoCo is referred to as an 8-bit machine,
> >> whereas the original IBM PC, which also had an 8-bit bus and 16-bit
> >> registers, was consistently referred to as a 16-bit machine.

<snip>