What are the "ports" used via IN/OUT, vs. the PEEK/POKE address space?

Question

This is something of a followup to How much control of TRS-80 Model III disk drives was possible from its Cassette (ROM) BASIC? but on a more general topic:

I know that PEEK and POKE enable direct access the computer's memory (both ROM and RAM) from most BASIC implementations on the early home computers. POKE N,B and B = PEEK(N) are, respectively, like *n = b; and b = *n; in C and I suppose in either the BASIC case or the C case their exact behavior depends on what memory mapping is set up.

Many platforms expose not just memory, but all of their "peripherals" through special memory addresses. I think the PDP-11 was this way based on all the opcodes I've seen, I understand the Apple ][ may have been this way as well. Even more recently, chips like the MSP430 and the AVR series at the instruction set level all ultimately seem to use a single "memory" address space for accessing anything of the world outside the processor, both actual memory and any other I/O devices.

However, with at least the TRS-80 (were there other examples? was this Z80 family specific?) there is another type of I/O exposed through BASIC: the IN and OUT commands.

What did those actually do?

The user manuals say they read/write to "ports". Is that just a higher level abstraction of something also accessible through the memory space, or did some I/O actually happen through a different mechanism?

I did find for example on the Model III a list of Memory Mapped I/O Devices that has some apparent overlap with the Ports list. For example the memory address 37E4h is listed as the "Cassette drive latch" while FF is listed as the "Cassette Unit I/O" port. Is OUT 255,42 equivalent to POKE 14308,42 then?

Answer 1

The TRS-80 series is Z80 based, and Z80 uses, like all 8080 offspring (*1,3) a separate address space for I/O. It allows easy decoding for I/O.

Thus memory address 0000h is different from I/O address 00h.

On logical (program) level, access to either address space is selected by the instructions used. Memory instructions always access memory address space and I/O do the same for I/O address space. On hardware level, it is marked by status signals. On a Z80 for example, an active /MREQ line signals memory access and thus a memory address on A0..15, while /IORQ does the same for I/O space.

In BASIC, PEEK and POKE are made to allow memory access. BASICs for x80/x86 CPUs therefore carry in addition IN and OUT instructions to allow access to ports (*4).

Other than having its own address space and instruction set for access, I/O does not differ from memory.

Historically having device specific I/O instructions, or more generically a separate I/O address space, was quite common and rather the norm. Making ports accessible via memory reference was out of the ordinary, requiring to add the adjective of 'memory mapped' to I/O. Off course, even on a CPU with a dedicated I/O space it is still possible to have memory mapped I/O. And that's what Tandy did for some of their interfaces. They were located in I/O space, but also mapped to memory as well.

The 8080/85 had an 8-bit I/O address space, while Z80 and later the 8086 extended this to 16-bit. Except, the Z80 handled 8-bit I/O addresses differently from 16-bit, and system design defines which is to be used.

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*1 - In fact it goes back to the 8008 (*2), except here only 8 input and 24 output ports could be addressed, as they shared one instruction format with a single 5 bit address without a direction signal. To distinguish, the top two bits were set to 00 for input, and each input instruction also output A first. Unusual for today's mind, but quite capable - and compared with its predecessor almost streamlined :)

*2 - Which took it from the Datapoint 2200, using a solution even more outlandish when seen from today: here only a single input port could be read with the dedicated INPUT instruction and no output command, but instead an 'External Command' EX which presented A on the external command bus accompanied by a 5 bit command code.

*3 - Yes, that means all the way to modern x86 CPUs.

*4 - I/O addresses are usually called ports.