Apple ][ disk/game server

On 27 Jan 2012 at 0:08, Rob Doyle wrote: I'll take issue with that, Rob. Bill Davidow was on our board of directors. When the software and hardware people ptiched the Moto 68K as a processor for the new machine, Davidow got mad (the 80286 was still not ready for prime time) and said it would be a cold day in hell if any product he had any say in wouldn't use an Intel processor. At the time, DOS (MS, SC, or PC) wasn't an issue. We were pointed at the 80186, along with the yet-nascent 80286 (they'd gotten real-mode sort of working, but PM wasn't there yet). The 80186 early steppings we were given were pretty buggy--one bug that still sticks in my mind is one where the SI and DI registers could be destroyed if an interrupt hit during a DMA operation. We went up to Bellvue and talked to Microsoft about Xenix on 2 CPU machines and came away with a listing of the I/O mechanism used on the TRS-80 model 16 (uses the Z80 for I/O, but otherwise executes on the 68K). At no time did the subject of the PC ever come up, although we did port an early copy of MS-DOS (1.something) to the 80186. The subject of IBM PC compatibility never came up. Altos and Televideo were also involved in using the early 80186 steppings. The problem was that Intel didn't really have anything ready to supplant the 8086, which was already showing its age, particularly in comparison to the 68K and the not-yet-ready-for-primetime NSC CPU. The 432 project had fizzled badly and the 186 and 286 were the only thing Intel had close to being ready at the time. The support peripherals for the 8086 were really old technology as well, mostly created to work with the 8085. It's interesting that the 80C186 EC contains several IBM-PC compliant components, such as cascaded 8259 PICs. So DOS was somewhere in their minds. --Chuck