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by teilo 2616 days ago
But the 8069 is a microprocessor (CPU). This is a microcontroller. Radically different architecture and (typical) use case.

They don't have MMUs because they are designed to directly address a much smaller ram space. On an the micro in the article, this is only 16K. They are also designed to execute machine code directly, and automatically from an on-board or external ROM, whether a masked ROM (rare these days), an EPROM, or an EEPROM/NVRAM of various kinds. They are not designed to use an OS at all.

That's what makes this so impressive.