30 Jun
2016
30 Jun
'16
9:49 p.m.
On Thu, Jun 30, 2016 at 11:32:08AM -0400, Dan Cross wrote:
MC68000 vs Intel 8088 seems like a no-brainer: the 68k
is the superior
chip. From a business perspective, I guess it was a very different matter,
but that's not my area and the ship has long sailed over the horizon.
Still, it's fun to speculate and I can't help but think that a 68k-based
IBM PC would have been a nicer machine.
+1
Something I never understood about the IBM PC: even
the 8088 machine was
fairly beefy compared to e.g. a PDP-11/20. The 6th Edition Unix kernel was
objectively pretty small and understandable; mini-Unix showed that that
sort of software could be used on a machine without an MMU. I've never
understood why IBM didn't just write a real OS in a high-level language
instead of saddling the world with MS-DOS. Perhaps it's naive of me, but
even if they didn't use Unix directly, it was an existence proof that such
a thing was possible. I suppose, again, it was less a technical issue and
more a business issue, or perhaps I'm underestimating the amount of work or
missing some of the technical complexities.
I wonder if they just didn't know. Unix was Bell Labs and Universities for
the most part. Was the timing such that they may not have been aware of
Unix? Or maybe they knew about Unix but thought it was for the vax?