19 May
1998
19 May
'98
4:50 p.m.
Allison J Parent wrote:
<> >....I think winders didn't run on
<> >the 80186(8) used in one of the tandys and a few oddballs. mostly beca
<> >the 186 has some on board peripherals (DMA and interrupts) that were n
<> >PCclone compatable.
It was sufficiently wierd enough that DOS barely ran and most apps didn't
like the climate. Even if windows ran, it was a 186... while faster than
a 8086 it wasn't faster than a 286. The 186 while a neat idea really did
well in the embedded control space where PC compatable hadn't poisoned
DOS ran fine, but a lot of PC apps didn't because they didn't use
DOS system calls -- remember, to get _any_ performance out of an
8088 (well, if it was on an IBM board), a l,ot of calls had to be
made directly to the IBM hardware. The Tandy 2000, with its 80186,
had a different memory map. And "compliant" programs ran better on
that 8Mhz 80186 than they did on the 6Mhz 80286 that showed up a
year later in the PC/AT. Problem really was that the Tandy 2000
was stuck with a "propriatary" bus -- since there wasn't a
"standard"
16-bit bus for MS-DOS machines until a year later when the slower AT
showed up. It can hurt _lots_ if you do a superior job at the wrong
time. (IBM sold Xenix for the PC for several months once -- that
product withdrawal was barely noticed while Tandy was shipping Xenix
for about two years before and several years after the IBM attempt --
Tandy only gave up Xenix development when they switched over to
nothing but PC compatible after 1986, so it was cheaper to fire the
support staff and switch to SCO. (At least for the customers -- it
took a while to switch the store bookkeeping systems from Tandy Xenix
to the popular stuff -- to this day, every Radio Shack store has a Unix
system sending every transaction to Fort Worth -- ask me in private
someday what it was like to be part of the test program for the Store
Operating System in 1981 -- call it release minus two -- release One
was reasonably stable before the end of 1882, but it was years later
(after my departure in '86) before receipts were written other than by
hand -- official company policy was that that gave "the personal touch".
--
Ward Griffiths
They say that politics makes strange bedfellows.
Of course, the main reason they cuddle up is to screw somebody else.
Michael Flynn, _Rogue Star_