Mail Archives: opendos/2000/12/07/18:33:38
I remember being shocked when IBM brought their brand-new "baby"
into our university, to show us students what "the future of computing"
looked like. The reason I was shocked was that it used four banks of
4116 DRAM's (for a total motherboard capacity of 64K). Given that the
rest of the world was adopting the 4164 DRAM (with four times the
capacity of the 4116), I was very much surprised that a "brand-new"
design such as this, used the soon-to-be-obsolete part.
So, while it is JUST possible that IBM may have considered the 8080
chip, I really think this is just an exaggeration. While the 4116 was
"past it's prime", the 8080(A) was well and truly obsolescent, and
nobody on the planet, not even at IBM, would have been unaware of
this. The other possibility is that some people have confused the
8080 with the 8085, since the latter is/was the successor to the 8080.
And, as I stated, IBM did have an 8085 design "lying around" when
the "powers that be" decided to go ahead with the "PC" ...
Joe.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Patrick Moran [SMTP:pmoran22 AT yahoo DOT com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 5 December 2000 19:51
> To: opendos AT delorie DOT com
> Subject: Re: Misc. (was BASIC & EMS, nee Optimizing CONFIG.SYS...)
>
>
> > > -----Original Message-----
> > > From: Da Silva, Joe
> > > Sent: Monday, 4 December 2000 11:45
> > > To: 'opendos AT delorie DOT com'
> > > Subject: RE: Misc. (was BASIC & EMS, nee Optimizing CONFIG.SYS...)
> > > 1. FYI : We all agree the 8088/8086 was a very stupid choice
> > > by IBM and is the reason we now have all these issues. The
> > > reason they chose this *very* poor performance chip, instead
> > > of the 68000 or Z8000 (both good performers, although I think
> > > Z8000 also uses segmented memory - yuck!!!) is that :
> > > a) They already had an 8085 design, which they could quickly
> > > "rehash" to use the 8088 chip.
> > > b) They had a license agreement with Intel, to make the 8088
> > > or 8086 chip themselves.
>
> I'm not sure that is true or if it was that came a lttile later. IBM was
> actually going to use the 8080 chip for thier PC. Gates suggested to them
> that they use the 8086/88 when they started looking for an OS for thier
> PC.
> Those that you mention above, may have come after that. We are talking a
> time frame of less than one year between the time Gates was contacted for
> an
> OS and the first release of the PC. Most people refere to thei as the
> PC-1.
> The offical PC came out six months later in Sep 1981 which is often called
> the PC-2..
>
> Imagine if IBM had actually used the 8080 for their PC! They would have
> been
> two or possibly three generations of chips behind the rest of the
> industry.
> I have seen several such references to this in articles in Byte and other
> magazines. SCP and other companies had already been using the 8086 in
> their
> computer designs before IBM even decided to get into the PC market. The
> 8086
> had already been developed long before that. The 88 was a more recent
> development and as you say, it could be plugged into a system in place of
> the 8085. But this was long before IBM entered the picture. Kaypro and
> other
> companies used this long before the IBM PC came out.
>
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