On Mon, 4 Jan 2021 at 17:42, Bill Degnan <billdegnan at gmail.com> wrote:
Agreed.
A fully provisioned IBM PC / XT in 1981-4 was pretty expensive too, that's why 8-bit
machines continued to sell well into the later 80's. 16-bit was overkill for most
home needs. Apple would not have survived the 80's without their 8-bit machine sales,
and Commodore, Atari, Tandy....
Definitely true.
And one thing that interests me is the double factoid:
[1] The companies that threw away their 8-bit line and did something
totally new for their 16-bit lines generally did better, and attempts
at backwards-compatibility failed
_except_
[2] For Intel/MICROS~1, who somehow managed to smoothly transition
from 8/16 ? true 16-bit ? 32-bit ? 64-bit ? multi-CPU ?
multi-core/multi-CPU, across multiple expansion buses, memory
architectures and more...
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