Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!orca.wv.tek.com!frip!andrew
From: andrew@frip.WV.TEK.COM (Andrew Klossner)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Re: Ho Hum...
Message-ID: <10959@orca.wv.tek.com>
Date: 3 Jun 91 20:32:35 GMT
References: <1991Jun3.151558.10408@colorado.edu>
Sender: nobody@orca.wv.tek.com
Reply-To: andrew@frip.wv.tek.com
Organization: Tektronix, Wilsonville, Oregon
Lines: 30

[]

		"Is it true that IBM decided to use the 8088 because
		using a fancier and more powerful processor would have
		endangered some minicomputers families they were
		selling back in 1981?"

	"Those are the rumors."

A more credible rumor is that IBM wanted to capitalize on the body of
existing CP/M-80 applications, most of which were written in assembler.
You can mechanically translate 8080 assembly code to 8086 code.  And it
probably helped that the 8086 was available in an eight-bit version,
the 8088.

	"I don't think the NS16000 has any real advantages over the
	68000."

The biggest such advantage is that the first NS16000 (actually named
the NS32016 at release) supported demand paging.  Motorola didn't
handle this until the 68020.  But this point is irrelevant -- the
NS32016 didn't show up until 1983, and the IBM PC was introduced in
1981.  At that time, the 16-bit contenders were 8086, 68000, and Zilog
Z8000, the CPU in the first commercial Unix desktop system.

Getting back to laptops, none of these non-8086 chips have come out in
low-power versions.

  -=- Andrew Klossner  (andrew@frip.wv.tek.com)
                       (uunet!tektronix!frip.WV.TEK!andrew)