On Wed, 6 Feb 2002 20:43, Joshua Lee wrote: > The S-100 bus existed as a standard bus on many CP/M boxes long before > the Apple II, though Apple is to be commended for it's open specs for
The reference was in context to the Apple, and the demise of Mrola, which is directly related. The S100 (or separately, the Apple bus) were 'copied' into the IBM pc. It is only ironic that the good idea wasn't enough. Volumes are what counted. > Intel beat the Motorollas only through brute force, The brute force equated to volumes and price. _because_ Apples were and are excessively expensive, they weren't high volumes (relative to cheaply made, unlicensed pc klones). The sheer volume of Intel cpu's was the brute force. It was nothing that Intel did or didn't do to make that happen. > Intel eventually having more megahertz. Motorolla always had > less clock cycles per instruction and a lot more elegance This is not the case at the point of disconnect. The 68040 was a gruntier, crunchier chip than the (early versions) of the 486. Intel did not 'win' based on more megahertz, Motorola did not 'lose' despite having a more elegant (read uniformly linear) cpu. Motorola had no place (other than Apple) to push it's cart in desktops (Amiga was a closed box). Where Mrola continues to win is any embedded engine based on it's CPU32 core. They compete head to head with Intel in volumes because it is single application-specific. (eg Palm pilots). Afaik, MC68HC11's, 05's , 680332 are dominant and Intel is an also ran. > Well, there were other factors, such as IBM choosing the 8088 for it's > PC. ;-) which brings me back full circle. History will never know if a very big player backing the 8086 caused it to win. What caused the 680x0 to lose is Apple's unambiguous greed, simple as that. >The 8080 and Z-80 were horrible, a total lack of useful addressing modes, >specialized registers in context to your paragraph, I don't think you were slagging the Z80. It was the most advanced cpu & peripheral family of it's day and your arguments for the 6502, while valid, are a risk/cisc argument, hotly debated in 1975 citing both as 'exhibit one'. The Z80 pinched many mainframe concepts (mostly from Xerox Sigma 6 & Univac 1100's), including vectored interrupts. A lack which continues to plague us with the irq limit on x86. Most commentators of the time remarked on the ultimate demise of Charlie Chaplin because they backed the wrong horse (snigger snigger): an 8086 which was designed by the flotsam of Intel that remained after Exxon bought out the original design team. Anyway, nice to sse you know what you're talking about <cheesy grin> -- http://linux.nf -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Linux-users mailing list - http://linux.nf/mailman/listinfo/linux-users Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Archives,and Digests are located at the above URL.
