[cctalk] Re: The 8086

On 11/16/24 16:24, Fred Cisin via cctalk wrote: Okay, I vass dere and know what we were being told by Intel marketing in the late 70s. The 8086 was not intended to be the eventual migration target for larger-scale applications. Similar claims can be made for the 80186--it was mostly intended for embedded applications. The thing that was supposed to be the architecture to hang one's hat on was the iAPX432. Intel's "Clean Slate" which was a horrible flop. Another "clean slate" was the i860; my i860 reference manual has a statement by BillG saying that MS intended to develop for that platform. It seems that every time that Intel tries to do development from a tabula rasa, they get burned. Witness Itanium/IA64. The thing that saved Intel's bacon on several occasions was their liberal licensing. Would we even have had the IBM 5150 if there weren't a pile of second sources for the 8088? My early 5150 had an AMD CPU in it. --Chuck