Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!hplabs!nsc!grenley
From: grenley@nsc.nsc.com (George Grenley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: NMI is SUPPOSED to be disabled!
Keywords: Memory,errors,parity,NMI
Message-ID: <7465@nsc.nsc.com>
Date: 1 Nov 88 19:43:14 GMT
References: <549@gt-eedsp.UUCP> <10045@bigtex.cactus.org>
Reply-To: grenley@nsc.nsc.com.UUCP (George Grenley)
Organization: National Semiconductor, Sunnyvale
Lines: 11

A person who shall remain nameless, while commenting on the lack of parity
on NeXTs, mentioned that the 80X86 family had a "design flaw" in that one
could not disable NMI without external hardware.

I am no fan of Intel or its machines, but this is a flat-out dumb remark.
NMI is not SUPPOSED to be maskable.  That's why they call it non-maskable.
I know of no uP which has a maskable NMI.

Intel did it right.  It's IBM, with their incredibly kludgy, screwed up,
committe'd to death AT design that is in error.

Buy a Mac!