1 Jul
2016
1 Jul
'16
2:57 a.m.
On 30 June 2016 at 15:21, Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr> wrote:
[...]
Two factors might had made the choice of 8088 a more
practical one for IBM.
[...]
In addition, the 8086 architecture was an extension of
the 8080 one, which
made it easier to make the MS-DOS API compatible with the CP/M one, which
was used by many popular programs. This would simplify their porting. (A
lot of early IBM PC software was written in assembly language.)
I heard that a lot of the BIOS was a simple-minded translation of
corresponding 8080-assembler. I believe that; if you look at the
horrible assembler, which was actually printed in the IBM Technical
Manual, you could see that most 8086 extensions were not used.
N.