8 Apr
2021
8 Apr
'21
12:04 a.m.
Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
Although some sources suggest that going with the
68000 and/or Unix were considered, it would have left the new machine without an instant
base of affordable small business applications. Speed to market was a leading paradigm for
the PC's design team.
Sun was making 68000-based systems in 1981, before the IBM PC was created.
But they only sold in small volumes, maybe a few thousand systems per year.
What I remember hearing was that IBM asked Motorola if they could make
250,000 68000 chips for the PC's first year. They said no. Intel said
yes to making 250,000 8088 chips, so they got the business.
It's great that Intel is finally losing the edge that they once had in
chip fabrication, because it was married to such rotten taste in
computer architecture. Perhaps over the next 30 years the industry can
finally evolve to less insane designs. (Even AMD is better than Intel
at architecture; they created a 64-bit x86 that was so reasonable that
Intel ended up adopting it.)
John