F8 (3850)

Fairchild

The F8 has had a profound impact on the microcomputer industry. When it first appeared, the F8 was discussed as an off-beat product with a strange set of chips and a rediculous instruction set. The chip set was strange because logic was organized with the goal of minimizing chip counts; in contrast, microprocessors such as the 8080A and 6800 were designed with logic distributed functionally on chips - one traditional CPU logic function per chip. The F8 instruction set was indeed dtrange, and in some cases quite limiting, but it reflects the simple chip design of the F8 CPU.
In this marketplace, the two-chip F8 system provided by a 3850 CPU and a 3851 PSU gained an early dominant position. Other microprocessors available when the F8 was introduced required seven or more chips to provide the same capabilities as the two-chip F8. The economics of consumer product volumes rendered the inefficiences of the F8 instruction set inconsequential; as a result, in 1977 the F8 was the world´s leading microprocessor in terms of CPU sales.

N-Channel isoplanar MOS technology; +5 V and +12 V power supply; well-designed microprocessor chip set; contains an instruction register (70 instr.), an accumulator, an interrupt control and power-on reset; a simple RC combination suffices to complete its on-chip clock oscillator; includes 64 bytes scratchpad RAM & two 8-bit-bi-directional I/O ports

2 MHz

A fully assembled and tested F8 microcomputer system. It includes an F8 CPU, SMI, PSU (with Fairbug) and 1 Kbyte RAM. Kit is supplied from manufacturer with F8 literature and a programming manual.

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A complete set of 3850 peripheral chips

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