Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!wuarchive!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: IBM PC prehistory Message-ID: <:+.2-9xds13@ficc.uu.net> Date: 9 Jan 90 15:25:30 GMT References: <1546@aber-cs.UUCP> <33896@mips.mips.COM> <21559@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <1989Dec30.235854.14254@world.std.com> <10131@microsoft.UUCP> <250@dg.dg.com> Reply-To: peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 16 > 6809 (Fast, ready, but not that much better than the Z80) I guess you had to be there, but I remember at the time thinking that IBM should have gone with the 6809 and used bank selection. Segments just looked like bank select on-chip, and Cromemco and others were doing lots of good stuff with bank selection on the Z80 and 8085. And the 6809 is considerably better than the Z80. Internally it's as much of a 16-bit processor as the 8088. Only 16 bits of address space, true. But is that so important when those extra bits of address are hidden in segment registers? Certainly the PDP-11 was still quite viable for small jobs, and the 6809 code was more compact than the PDP-11. I hate to say nice things about Radio Shack, but look at some of the good stuff that came out for the Coco. OS/9, for one. Cocos with megabytes of RAM, for another. -- _--_|\ Peter da Silva. +1 713 274 5180. . / \ Also or \_.--._/ v "Have you hugged your wolf today?" `-_-'