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Microcomputer Systems: the 8086/8088 Family

Article  in  Software & Microsystems · January 1985

DOI: 10.1049/sm.1985.0005

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- Book reviews
Microcomputer systems: the 8086/8088 family
Yu-Cheng Lin and Glenn A. Gibson
Prentice-Hall International, 1984, 550pp., £31.30
ISBN: 0-13-580944-4,
'Microcomputer systems: the 8086/8088 family' describes
in depth the hardware and software of microcomputer
systems, illustrating the general points with 8086/8088
microprocessor systems. It is a very informative and co-
herent presentation and suitable both for taught courses
and for someone teaching themselves. Since the IBM PC
uses the 8088 the book should also interest PC users.
After an introductory description of the components of
a microcomputer system and the organisation of data and
memory there follows a detailed description of the 8086
architecture and assembly language. The text is packed with
example programs to help an experienced programmer see
the important features of the 8086 and to encourage and
direct a beginner. The choice of the 8086 to illustrate the
book is a good one because of its advanced features and its
ability to support a sophisticated microcomputer system,
but it is probably a difficult introduction to assembly
language programming. The authors suggest that a knowledge
of Fortran or Basic is adequate, but knowledge of a simpler
assembly language would also help. The ASM-86 Assembler
is used to illustrate the book.
The next four chapters cover systems programming.
Before considering the details the authors emphasise the
importance of modular programming and give some
important software design guidelines with examples. They
show how the software structures which allow modular
programming are implemented in the 8086 language, how
they are managed at the translation and linking stages by
the system software, and finally how they are physically
located in and executed by the computer.
Byte and string manipulation and code translation are
discussed next, again with excellent examples, and then
we move on to input/output programming. Clear diagrams,
flowcharts and program examples illustrate programmed
and interrupt I/O and there are discussions of priority
management and DMA.
An introduction to multiprogramming in the last of the
software chapters explains the uses of and problems with
running two or more independent processes or jobs at the
same time. Process scheduling, semaphore operations,
sharing of common procedures and memory management
are nicely illustrated on Intel's iRMX-8% operating system.
Ada — Concurrent programming
Narain Gehani
Prentice-Hall International, 1984, 261pp., £25.70
ISBN: 0-13-004011-8
Ada was designed with real-time programming in mind and
therefore provides sophisticated concurrent programming
facilities. This book describes these facilities with the aid of
26
The remaining five chapters talk about the hardware of
microcomputer systems. The book's preface does not say
that the reader needs to know any electronics, but the
authors do use digital electronic block diagrams, logic
circuits, latches, tranceivers, synchronising circuits, transistor
circuits and monostables with little introduction or
explanation. Chapter 8 covers the internal bus configurations
for the 8086/8088 and the bus control logic for the 8086/
8088. Some of this is pretty detailed. Of a more general
nature, although still illustrated by 8086/8088 examples,
are discussions of system bus timing, interrupt priority
management and bus standards.
The chapter on I/O interfaces is excellent, clear and full
of diagrams and examples. The format of a general intro-
duction followed by specific applications with 8086 systems
has worked very well. The text covers serial communication,
parallel communication,keyboards and displays, DMS con-
trollers and diskette controllers.
After another well illustrated short chapter about
semiconductor memories come two chapters dealing with
supporting processors for 8086 systems, from slave
coprocessor configurations through to networks. We are
introduced to the specific features and instruction sets of
several supporting processors for the 8086 including the
8087 maths processor and the 8089 I/O processor.
'Microcomputer systems: the 8086 family' shows just
how many words good diagrams and examples can be worth.
Because it manages to pack in both general discussions and
detailed examples of every aspect of sophisticated
microcomputer systems it has a coherence that is often
hard to achieve in this subject. It has an excellent biblio-
graphy and literally hundreds of end of chapter questions.
Were it not for the price, it would make a useful under-
graduate text — perhaps a paperback edition is planned? It
should also be useful for technical people working on
microcomputer systems for the first time, a position that
graduates from physics and mathematics courses may find
themselves in.
The only reservations I have are that the authors assume
their readers to have more background knowledge than
they state in the preface and that the book could do with a
glossary to aid cross-referencing. These are quibbles, though,
about a book on which the authors have obviously spent
much time and care and which does them great credit.
N.F. THORNHILL
a variety of examples. In addition the non-concurrent
features of Ada are carefully described in an appendix.
Chapter 1 contains a survey of concurrent programming
and argues the case for having concurrency as a language
feature as well as explaining why languages such as PI/I
and Algol 68 were deficient in this area. The ideas of mutual
exclusion, synchronisation and communication between
processes are all explained, together with mechanisms
Software & Microsystems, Vol. 4, No. 1, February 1985