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From: johnl@ima.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: What if IBM Had chosen the 68000? No
Message-ID: <100000003@ima.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 23-Nov-85 17:59:00 EST
Article-I.D.: ima.100000003
Posted: Sat Nov 23 17:59:00 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 25-Nov-85 07:48:38 EST
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Nf-ID: #R:looking:-45600:ima:100000003:000:1035
Nf-From: ima!johnl    Nov 23 17:59:00 1985


I always heard that when IBM was designing the PC, they planned to build it
around the Z80, since that was the standard chip at the time.  The 8088 was
worked in fairly late, since it could use more or less the same bus and eight-
bit peripherals, and CP/M-86 was supposed to be 100% compatible with CP/M.
(I also heard that most IBM people thought at the time the PC was announced
that MS-DOS was also 100% compatible with CP/M-80, whatever that meant.)

They were very concerned about the list price of the original PC, which is
why your basic PC came with 16K and a cassette port.  Count your blessings.
We could be sitting here arguing about the best way to bank switch 512K into
a 64K address space.

John Levine, ima!johnl

PS:  I still think the 8086 and its kin, except perhaps the 80386, are
superbly suited for controlling high performance vending machines, and that
in a perfect world IBM would have waited longer before "rationalizing" the
PC market, so we could all have leapt directly from the Z80 to the National
32532.