Re: [COFF] Why did Motorola fail?

On Fri, 10 Aug 2018 12:23:10 +1000 Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com> wrote: I think the greatest influence has to be what IBM choose for the PC. This is what Gates said in a 1997 interview with the PC Magazine: For IBM it was extremely different because this was a project where they let a supplier -- a partner, whatever you call us -- shape the definition of the machine and provide fundamental elements of the machine. When they first came to us, their concept was to do an 8-bit computer. And the project was more notable because they were going to do it so quickly and use an outside company....The novel thing was: could you work with outsiders, which in this case was mostly ourselves but also Intel, and do it quickly? And the key engineer on the project, Lou Eggebrecht, was fast-moving. Once we convinced IBM to go 16-bit (and we looked at 68000 which unfortunately wasn't debugged at the time so decided to go 8086), he cranked out that motherboard in about 40 days. Dave Bradley, who wrote the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) for the IBM PC, and many of the other engineers involved say IBM had already decided to use the x86 architecture while the project was still a task force preparing for management approval in August 1980. In a 1990 article for Byte, Bradley said there were four main reasons for choosing the 8088. First, it had to be a 16-bit chip that overcame the 64K memory limit of the 8-bit processors. Second, the processor and its peripheral chips had to be immediately available in quantity. Third, it had to be technology IBM was familiar with. And fourth, it had to have available languages and operating systems. Cribbed from: https://forwardthinking.pcmag.com/chips/286228-why-the-ibm-pc-used-an-intel…