The 8051 can directly interface with a number of I/O. The 8255 just gives you the abilty to access 3 eight bit ports using a minimum number of control bits from the 8051
The difference between a single board computer and microcontroller is that a single board lacks a general purpose interface and the mass storage devices.
SCSI interface would be what you're looking for.
the watchdog timer is a circuit that will simply time out sending an alert telling peripheral devices that data is incorrect or at least non reliable
Universal Serial Bus (USB) is a wired serial bus standard to interface computers and electronics devices. It is commonly used to interface computers to computer peripheral, digital cameras and memory devices.
SCSI stands for Small Computer System Interface. It is a set of standards for connection and transfer of data to peripheral devices.
USB
Peripheral component interconnect(PCI) is a high band width processor independent bus. It is the most widely used hardware interface for connecting the peripheral devices.
peripheral devices
they are called pheripherals.
Invention patented by Hubert Kuo and I-Ming Lin on March 17th, 2003. Abstract: An embedded control unit is installed in a notebook computer, so as to take the place of the programmable processor in many conventional notebook computers for controlling peripheral devices. The embedded control unit includes a plurality of peripheral controllers, so as to control the peripheral devices usually used by typical notebook computers. The peripheral controllers can be directly connected to the peripheral devices, according to the specifications for different types and/or brands of notebook computers. In addition, the peripheral controllers can achieve control of the peripheral devices according to the non-adjustable internal register settings. In this way, the control of the peripheral devices can be achieved without using firmware, thereby simplifying the notebook computer development process and reducing the development cost.
Some storage devices can be classed as peripheral devices, so yes you can.
Memory drives are peripheral devices that are very useful