Romless microcontroller

[ptewright]

I am looking at a circuit diagram of some old machine, and I noticed that it used a romless microcontroller(80c32) instead of a single chip microcontroller like the 8051. Is there an advantage for this use? I'm thinking that this was probably used because 8051s might not have existed when this machine was designed quite a few years back. I think that using the romless microcontroller seems to require more components (eg. latches and eprom). Also, does anyone have a tutorial or link about romless microcontrollers? Thanks

 

[StupidDum]

Perhaps that is for One Time Program (OTP) ROM.
This save cost if you are to manufacture large amount of unit.
Beside, those were the days when flash, EEPROM were not popular yet.