6 Jun
2014
6 Jun
'14
8:49 a.m.
On Jun 6, 2014, at 8:20 AM, Al Kossow <aek at bitsavers.org> wrote:
That's interesting. One of the first projects that I was looking at once I moved into
the PC group (ESD...I was in GSD) at IBM was to look at a 68K board for the original IBM
PC (at that point in time we weren't really welded to Intel CPUs and were
investigating alternatives that would give us more "headroom" in terms of CPU
capabilities). It was admitted internally that the 8088 was a TTM (time-to-market) ploy
and we wanted something that would give us more capabilities going forward. The problem
(if you want to call it that) was that by the time we actually started looking at
alternatives the PC was already wildly successful and (IBM being IBM) S/W compatibility
took over all future discussions.
As a side note, my 2nd project was what was to become the IBM PC Convertible. We were
really pushing technology with that one (no really). We were almost at the prototype
stage (we had physical mockups and complete schematics and board layouts) when corporate
politics intervened and the project was moved from Boca Raton to Austin where it took 4(!)
years to finally ship at which point it wasn't nearly so ground breaking.
TTFN - Guy
Being PC compatible would not have made any sense
for Apple from a marketing perspective; their angle was "being the alternative".
The first project I worked on at Apple (1986) was a 16MHz 68000 that went into a PC AT
slot.
It never got past a proof of concept because marketing didn't want us to get into the
PC Peripheral business.
We had to have the Apple brand as a box on the desktop, and it CERTAINLY couldn't be
FASTER than a Mac Plus.