Rod Coleman's personal history of founding, building & running SAGE

[ben]

On 1/4/2021 10:26 AM, Liam Proven via cctalk wrote:
> 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...
> 
I say IBM is the winner here. IBM 7030 Stretch gave IBM a design based 
on 8 bit bytes, that followed with the IBM 360. Salesman love bytes 
because now your 4K of memory (36/48 bits) is  32KB of IBM memory and 
time sharing because you can FAKE the need for real memory.
Ben Fan of 36 bits but not the PDP 10.