Date: Wed, 08 Aug 2001 02:17:24 -0700 From: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>, j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: How did the MSFT monopoly start? Message-ID: <3B7103A4.558B9B3B@mindspring.com> References: <20010806142544.A64348@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <15214.52633.581653.632317@guru.mired.org> <3B6F98D0.A3C22CC9@mindspring.com> <20010808160551.Q78395@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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Greg Lehey wrote: Obviously, like my off the list references to the livelock papers I tried to send you, the direct email to you will bounce from your overambitious "spam" bouncer, which insists I'm a spammer because Earthlink bought my ISP and assignned me a mindspring address... Oh well... > > They switched to the Intel 8088 (*not* 8086, yet) because Motorolla > > could not commit volume, and IBM wanted a license to fabricate. > > This seems unlikely. Where do you get this from? At the time, the PC > project was just another pie-in-the sky project, an attempt to do > better than the failed 5100. Please see the quote from the Cringly book, and the URL for the full transcripts of "Triumph of the Nerds" on the PBS site. > > CP/M-88 and MP/M-88. > > There never ware operating systems with these names. It came with > optional CP/M 86. I don't know about MP/M 86, but it's quite > possible. It was 80, not 88 or 86. Yes, I remember both CP/M-86 and MP/M-86; I ran them on my Amiga under the emulater. I ran the CP/M-80 on my Timex Sinclair Z80, and the Z80 cartridge for my C-64 and Z80 emulators in a lot of places (I still have Nevada COBOL and Nevada FORTRAN on floppy, as well as the Z80 Aztec C compiler). > > The 86 was later. > > The 86 was earlier. 1976. The 8088 was just a low-cost 8086, with an > 8 bit bus, enabling machines to be made with a lower chip count. The > processor core was almost identical; I think the only difference was > the pipeline length. I suspect that the part count was what really > caused IBM to go with the 8088 and not the 68000; the former needed > only 8 memory chips (1 bit wide), the latter would have needed 32. Lowe is quoted as wanting volume off the shelf parts; in fact, Gates tried to steer him toward a 16 bit processor, but the IBM confidentiality agreement urged him not to reveal confidential information, so he didn't reveal what he knew about CP/M-86, so the OS was not an issue: (Also from Cringely's book): Choosing a 16-bit processor was easy. Intel, Motorola, and National Semiconductor were all shipping 16-bit processors at the time. Intel had the 8086 and 8088 processors, Motorola had the 68000, and National had its 16032. The National processor was elegant and powerful; the Motorola was powerful and easy to write software for; the Intel 8086 was fairly powerful but had an awkward memory architecture; the Intel 8088 was an 8086 without the power. Of course, IBM chose the 8088--the least attractive of all the processors from a technical standpoint. In this case, technical considerations took a back seat to IBM's manufacturing and marketing concerns. The plan was to build a computer without any custom components--just off-the-shelf parts from major semiconductor makers. The 8088 was the only 16-bit processor for which there was available a full complement ot the support chips required to build a computer. Motorola and National were still working on their 16-bit support chips, as was Intel for the 8086. But the 8088 was a 16-bit processor in an 8-bit body, since it used an 8-bit data bus--sending and receiving data 8 bits at a time and then processing them in 16-bit mode. This 8-bit bus is what made the 8088 less powerful than the other contenders, but it also made it possible for the 8088 to use support chips intended for the earlier 8080 family of Intel 8-bit processors. Since the 8088 was the only processor that could be used without developing custom support chips, it was the only processor that fit IBM's needs. [ ... DEC and Tandy can't make a serial port work to save their life ... ] > I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the UART which killed these machines. > Was that the Z-80 SIO? It was a Zilog UART. But I think you are maybe thinking of the Z80 based serial processor in the Tandy-16 and retrofit Tandy 6000, which had 8 inch floppies and could have 14 inch 5M hard drives added, for ungodly cost... > >> FWIW, Gates sold IBM a product he didn't have. He then went out and > >> bought QDOS - the Quick and Dirty OS - from SCC, which had written > >> it for their 8086 S-100 boxes because Digital Research kept > >> delaying CP/M-86. > > Ah, I missed this before. Yes, this is almost exactly correct. The > company was Seattle Computer Products, SCP. The rest is exactly > correct. The price tag for the rights was $50,000. Gates also knew about CP/M-86, but didn't disclose it, even though QDOS had code taken line-for-line from CP/M. > > IBM attempted several times to contact Digital Research about > > licensing CP/M, but they never returned IBM's calls, > > So how come the PC was released with optional CP/M? That was optional later. Originally, it wasn't. Mostly, it was because there were tools that would run under it with a simple cross-assembler. > > and then their founder died. > > We can be pretty sure that if he had stayed alive, it wouldn't have > made any difference, given the length of "then". Yeah. > > Cringely covers this in detail, both in his book, and the videos > > based on it. > > Does he suggest a temporal relationship between the OS choice and the > death of Gary Kildall? That would be very wrong. No. That was me, converting his death to a plane wreck... if he died six other ways, a seventh wasn't going to make him any more or less dead. 8-). -- Terry To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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