Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!oliveb!intelca!intsc!tomk From: tomk@intsc.UUCP (Tom Kohrs @fae) Newsgroups: comp.sys.m68k,comp.sys.intel Subject: Re: Re: Re: Recent Motorola ad seen in Byte Message-ID: <932@intsc.UUCP> Date: Thu, 16-Apr-87 18:44:29 EST Article-I.D.: intsc.932 Posted: Thu Apr 16 18:44:29 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 19-Apr-87 10:03:08 EST References: <362@sbcs.UUCP> <930@intsc.UUCP> <1517@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> Distribution: comp Organization: Intel Sales, Silicon Valley, Ca. Lines: 42 Xref: mnetor comp.sys.m68k:358 comp.sys.intel:156 > In article <1517@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM> Michael Lodman (mike.lodman@SanDiego.NCR.COM) writes: > In article <930@intsc.UUCP> tomk@intsc.UUCP (Tom Kohrs @fae) writes: > >I will be the first one to admit that the IBM PC and its derivatives are a > >kludge. But don't blame the 386 for IBM's incompetence. > > Will you also admit that the 8086 and its derivatives are a kludge? > And I do blame Intel. > Not at all! The 8086 architecture was a real nice way of extending the address range back in the days when the dominate machine was the 8085 and Z-80. Swapping segment registers to change address was so much nicer than doing bank selections or overlays. The 286 architecture is considerably nicer than what was the dominate 16bit mini at the time, the PDP-11. In 1980 the idea that you could get the cpu power of an 11/70 on a chip with a cleaner memory management model got a lot of people excited. What caused most of the frustration toward the 286 was DEC and Motorola both went to a 32bit programming model at that time. Programmers quickly jumped to arms to adhere to the old maxim of using all of the available memory plus one byte. When these neat new programs (ie BSD 4.x) were forced back down to the 16 bit architecture things got tricky. Many programmers decided that programming in a 32 bit environment required less effort and less need for structure than the 16 bit environment and so to justify their not liking to work on 16 bit machines they were labled as being kludges or obsolete. The only thing I could fault Intel for is possibly not going to a 32 bit architecture sooner, but we were too busy building 80186's (5-6 million sold so far). Also we were learning about how to build an MMU (the hard part) without having to debug 32 bit ALU's at the same time. The design decision that was made 9+ years ago was do we build a slow 32bit machine or a fast 16 bitter. Intel decided on the fast 16bit, Motorola went for the slow 32 bit. The rest is history. > I don't mean to imply that Intel has never had good microprocessors. The > 8080A was a fine machine. But from that point on, Intel seemed to lose > its edge, first to Zilog and the Z80, and then to Motorola and the 68000. > > I hope that the '386 is a step in the right direction for Intel... I hope so too, now that I am a stock holder.