10 Oct
2006
10 Oct
'06
3:24 p.m.
1984, PCs
already existed for 2+ years so why, oh why, did they decide to
ignore the "PC compatible" trend?
Although it's hard to believe in retrospect, this was not at all uncommon.
There were still a bunch of manufacturers out there who thought that they
could "do better' than IBM at PC design. There was also a mistaken notion
that all one had to do was to be MS-DOS compatible.
Think of what came before the IBM PC -- CP/M machines. Those had wildly
differnt hardware (some had memory mapped video, some used a serial
terminal, for example), and yet a lot of software would run on just about
any CP/M box with fairly minor configuration.
I think the problem was that the IBM BIOS was such a poor piece of
firmware that you _had_ to hit the metal directly to do anything much.
And that meant that BIOS (and worse still MS-DOS) compatibilty was not
enough.
-tony