On 1/4/2021 10:26 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 17:42, Bill Degnan <billdeg...@gmail.com> wrote:
Agreed.
A fully provisioned IBM PC / XT in 1981-4 was pretty expensive too, that's why
8-bit machines continued to sell well into the later 80's. 16-bit was overkill
for most home needs. Apple would not have survived the 80's without their
8-bit machine sales, and Commodore, Atari, Tandy....
Definitely true.
And one thing that interests me is the double factoid:
[1] The companies that threw away their 8-bit line and did something
totally new for their 16-bit lines generally did better, and attempts
at backwards-compatibility failed
_except_
[2] For Intel/MICROS~1, who somehow managed to smoothly transition
from 8/16 → true 16-bit → 32-bit → 64-bit → multi-CPU →
multi-core/multi-CPU, across multiple expansion buses, memory
architectures and more...
I say IBM is the winner here. IBM 7030 Stretch gave IBM a design based
on 8 bit bytes, that followed with the IBM 360. Salesman love bytes
because now your 4K of memory (36/48 bits) is 32KB of IBM memory and
time sharing because you can FAKE the need for real memory.
Ben Fan of 36 bits but not the PDP 10.
