Sorcery wrote:TUK020 wrote:
Interesting. I had a slightly different take on this - I was working at Intel in the early 80's when there was the battle for dominance between Motorola 68000 and Intel 8086/88.
I think Motorola had the better architecture at the time, but Intel grasped sooner that the key investment issue for their customers was in software development, and they put much more effort into design tools Development Systems, In Circuit Emulators etc.
And once a company had made significant investment in development tools, and then more critically in engineers training on compilers etc, then the design wins went down the path of least resistance
I remember the Motorola 68000 too but from a user programmer's perspective. In the days of using DEC PDP/11s and VAXs the 68000 looked more like a VAX apart from it only having 16 registers and split into 2*8, one set for addressing and one set for (arithmetic & data manipulation). In retrospect perhaps an 80386 with 32 bit addressing and 32 bit registers, would be a better comparison. The 8086/88 should never have become the chip of choice for IBM.
Turning to Microsoft, I seem to recall that an IBM purchasing manager visited the company that made the CP/M operating system and expecting to find an office full of head-down nerds, found that the CEO was playing golf. So the IBM person left and went to visit Microsoft also unannounced and gave them the operating system development which turned out to be MSDOS. Look at them now.
A couple of things it is easy to forget.
When IBM Entry Level Systems developed the PC, their 10 forecast for the device was 75k units. If they had had any inkling of how many they would actually have sold, they would have developed both processor and OS in house.
Secondly, when the PC was introduced, the 64k DRAM chips represented a significant % of the material cost. The selected 8088 chip only needed an 8 bit databus - only 8 memory chips needed, rather than 16 or 32.