Pentium for Non-PC (Was Statement & apology (was Re: 10 Year Rule))

I would argue the PC _was_ defined by the IBM Techref. There's a lot more to a machine than the CPU. Go back to the time of the IBM PC. There were several other 8088 boxes around that were not compatible. Sure they might have run MS-DOS or CP/M 86. But you couldn't take a bootable disk from one machine and boot it on another. In many cases applications programs from one machine wouldn't run on another, I seem to rememebr at least 3 levels of compatibiliy : OS compatible -- the MS-DOS calls were the same, any program that used those and those alone would run on both machines BIOS compatible -- the BIOS calls were the same. You could use those (and MS-DOS calls) and have no compatibility problems Hardware compatible. The memory map was much the same, I/O devices had the same registers at the same port addresses, the video system was the same, and so on. You could 'hit the bare metal' with no compatability problems. It is the last level that we normally consider when we talk about 'PC compatible' I think, By that defitinion _any_ computer is PC-Compatible. My HP71 could run an interpreter written in BASIC that treats a couple of 9114 floppies as the main memory of an emulated PC, and boots MS-DOS from a third one. Accesss to video RAM could be sent to the HPIL video interface, and so on. The fact that it would take years to even get to an MS-DOS prompt is irrelevant :-) But OK, I'll rephrase the question. Are there Pentium-based machines that can't run the standard Windows we all know and hate, or a slightly modified version of said software (and for reasons other than the trivial ones of insufficient memory or disk space etc). That is, I am thinking of machines with very different I/O devices, etc. It appears such machines do exist. And I would argue that once they reach sufficient age they should be considered as 'classics'. -tony