Seema Joshi:

If you are a student at a technical school or university and they are using course materials that center around the use of old Intel chips such as the 8279, please copy this posting and take it to your faculty advisor.

In days gone by it was common that a 500 level microprocessor training course would use reference to chips of the types like Intel 8085, 8255, 8275, 8259, 8251, 8253, 8282, 8279 etc. However these chips are not mainstream parts anymore. They are now typically only available in surplus part inventories and at flea market vendor outlets. It is time that professors get out of whatever rut they put themselves in some 15 to 20 years ago and re-write their course materials around the state of the art flash based microcontroller technology. There is certainly no shortage of technical book type resources that could be used as texts or course guides that cover all manner of up to date embedded systems design. All too often we have seen that professors are just plain lazy and keep using the same materials for teaching year after year - decade after decade.

Suggest that you are interested in learning with the latest technology!! You will learn the same things about algorithms, software design and embedded control systems whether you use 20 year old chips or with "today" chips. However there will be no job after the university to design an embedded Blue Tooth coffee pot controller using an 8085 CPU with 2716 EPROM, 8253 timer, and 8279 keyboard/display controller! Your quiery about the 8279 is not as common as others such as the 8255 PI/O chip that we see here often, but is demonstrative of a similar issue.

It is unfortunate that the universities and technical schools seem to often train so many new engineers with archival type information. Gone is the day when universities had to rely on the good graces of an Intel or an AMD or a TI to provide access to educational materials. Today design information is as close as a vendor web site, a good on-line discussion forum and a powerful Google type search engine. Anyone setting out to take a university course or technical school session on embedded design should insist on the use of up to date information in the course materials. It should be no different than other fields. I highly doubt that any current medical school has a 500 level course on the benefits and techniques of blood letting @@ !

Michael Karas