On 8/24/2006 at 8:32 PM Jules Richardson wrote:
Well if the IBM PC hadn't turned up, surely
computers would have ended up
in the hands of the masses anyway? There were plenty of good, robust,
expandable systems with good software support worldwide at the time - all
it needed
was for society to be ready to accept 'the
computer' on a wider scale. IBM
just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and it's
unfortunate
that they'd built a turkey :-)
IBM was merely playing safe and making the smallest investment they could
wihtout producing a complete piece of junk. Had Gary Kildall (may he rest
in peace) been more flexible, we would most likely have been running CP/M
and GEM--neither one a revolutionary product. When I hear someone talk
about how "revoluationary" the IBM PC was, I grit my teeth. I think IBM
remembered what a debacle the "revolutionary" 5100 was. The PC pretty
much sold itself in the beginning.
I can't honestly admit that I feel any sort of affinity for the Intel x8x
(including the Z80), even though I've had tons of low-level programming
time on the entire family. The processor family, right from the 8008,
always seemed to introduce capabilities through an agglutinative process
rather than through revolutionary design. I give Moto a lot of credit for
rethinking their processor architecture periodically. The question as to
what it got them competitively is a whole different matter.
Cheers,
Chuck