IIRC DMA was designed to allow peripherals (floppy drives, parallell ports, etc....

		fiskfiskfisk on Aug 4, 2013 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Hard drive hack provides root access, even after r... IIRC DMA was designed to allow peripherals (floppy drives, parallell ports, etc.) to move data from their input lines to regular memory without having to bother the CPU. Uncompressed, full resolution video wasn't too much of a real concern back in the days of the 80286 :-)