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From: davidsen@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP (William E. Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Intel Microprocessors
Message-ID: <6950@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 8-Aug-87 22:27:36 EDT
Article-I.D.: steinmet.6950
Posted: Sat Aug  8 22:27:36 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 9-Aug-87 13:25:27 EDT
References: <1112@lznv.ATT.COM> <399@aucs.UUCP> <3225@cucca.columbia.edu> <789@unccvax.UUCP> <75@sdeggo.UUCP>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen)
Organization: General Electric CRD, Schenectady, NY
Lines: 22

Several reasons IBM chose the Intel 8088:
 1) it allowed an upgrade from CP/M, the most popular o/s in use at that
time. There are translate programs which will take a CP/M-80 program and
produce a MS-DOS program (assembler).

 2) There were a number of problems with the 68k in terms of support
chip (not really available) and the cost of a 16bit memory path.

 3) Intel programs are MUCH smaller than 68k programs, due to the many
one byte instructions (yes I know the instruction set is irregular).
There cost of memory has come down. When the PC was introduced it had
64k and that was considered enough for all but power users. The program
size difference is still there (Sun/3 vs Xenix/386 program size) and
with a pipeline machine, this allows somewhat slower memory to be used.

Flames to /dev/null! I have both types of processor and am clarifying
the points, not making a personal choice.

-- 
	bill davidsen		(wedu@ge-crd.arpa)
  {chinet | philabs | sesimo}!steinmetz!crdos1!davidsen
"Stupidity, like virtue, is its own reward" -me