23 Jun
2023
23 Jun
'23
4:04 a.m.
Didn't see anyone mention it, but one should recall that the whole memory
space on the 8088/8086 was 1M, so a 'limit' (whatever kind) of 640K wasn't
the dumbest computer design decision ever made. In addition to that, Intel
was telling people to get ready to jump to iAXP432 because 8086/80286 was
nothing but a stopgap, and anyway the 80286 was for high-end minicomputer
replacements, so why assume that more than 1M on an 8086-type CPU for PCs
for an OS that was going to be obsoleted anyway was the future.
KJ
On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 1:26 AM Ethan Dicks via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 10:26 PM Tomasz Rola via
cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I guess we are all prisoners of our own mental
frame. I recall that
Ken Olsen (DEC founder), once quipped "There is no reason for any
individual to have a computer in his home." - that was in 1977,
according to wikiquote:
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen
One version of that story is he told it to David Ahl who was trying to
pitch a <$2000 PDP-8 for the home market (IIRC a configuration like a
4-slot box with a KK8A, some basic I/O and a smallish MOS RAM card -
too small to compete with a "real" PDP-8 system).
Ken's reaction was an element of what led to David going off to found
Creative Computing, as the story goes.
-ethan