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From: pypaz@warwick.ac.uk (Larry Bauer)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: Re: Why IBM went for the 8088 -- The Untold Story
Keywords: S100 IEEE-696 SC-DOS Seattle MS-DOS IBM_PC
Message-ID: <535@clover.warwick.ac.uk>
Date: 26 May 90 16:26:42 GMT
References: <1WWjqN#0SBCWN5sLFYH9X6tz009zLSK=eric@snark.uu.net> <1990May23.154706.16476@sq.sq.com> <4790@pegasus.ATT.COM>
Reply-To: pypaz@warwick.ac.uk (Larry Bauer)
Organization: Computing Services, Warwick University, UK
Lines: 18

In article <4790@pegasus.ATT.COM> dmt@pegasus1.ATT.COM (Dave Tutelman) writes:
>
>>SC-DOS was originally a clone of CP/M, but done for the 8086,
>>the 8088's faster sibling...
>	You're being slightly misleading about the 8086 vs. 8088 here.
>	They're software-identical, and both chips were available in

Being slightly pedantic here, but there is at least one *important*
software related difference between the 8088 and the 8086. The prefetch queue
on the 8088 is 4 instructions and on the 8086 is 6 (or is it 6 and 8?).
This may seem a trivial difference, but self-modifying code that patches
itself really close to the program counter operates somewhat differently on
the two machines. It also takes a long time to find this in the manuals
when debugging...

Who me...write self-modifying code? but that's *bad* programming practice 8-)

--larry