Re: Stolen designs

John Larkin wrote:
On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 17:19:01 GMT, mzenier@xxxxxxxxxx (Mark Zenier)
wrote:


Microsoft was a half a dozen guys eating Pizza in Albuquerque, and
IBM was in full "we invent everything we need" mode back when the 8086 was cooked up.

It always seemed to me that both Microsoft and Intel were out of the
mainstream of computing, which is why we wound up locked into the
bizarre, short-sighted kluges we have today. If IBM had picked the 68K
and Digital Research...

John



The IBM engineers wanted the 68k - it was vastly better suited for the job. But some suit decided the 68k was too expensive, and the 8088 was cheaper. It didn't matter that it was old-fashioned and a poor design even when it was made, since they didn't plan on selling more than a few thousand machines anyway. The original PC was just a marketing experiment, to help find out what the market really needed - then they would re-design it with a sensible choice of processor.
.

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