On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 09:31:05AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > On Monday 15 March 2021 07:05:02 tomas@tuxteam.de wrote: > > > On Mon, Mar 15, 2021 at 11:09:35AM +0100, Sven Hartge wrote: > > > > [...] > > > > > Another rumor I read was that IBM, when developing the first IBM PC > > > in 1980, opted to use the 8086/8088 CPU instead of the also availble > > > M68k CPU because the Intel one was less powerful so it would not be > > > in competition with the mainframes the PC was supposed to interface > > > with primarily. > > > > Too lazy to research now, but it sounds credible, yes. > > > > > If this rumor is true and IBM had acted differently, the PC > > > ecosystem today would also look quite differently. > > > > Or the Z8000. Absolutely. 8086 was, architecturally, the worst > > possible choice at that time. > > > That, IIRC was a new, super shiny, thing from zilog. No experience with > it, but if it was as unreliable as the z-80, was, I'm not sorry it > failed. The Z-80 had an instruction that swapped the [...] I take that back. Z8000 was a 16 bit data/24 bit address thing; it did have a segmented architecture, so it wasn't as "clean" as I remembered it. At that time I was just a little student, so my "experience" with that stuff was to drool over design articles in the usual magazines (EE, AFAIR). Cheers - t
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