Stolen designs

It doesn't mater squat what the geeks wanted. They weren't getting Moto. Price had nothing to do with it.

But IBM didn't pick, the customers did. Both MS-DOS and CPM/86 were there on the shelf next to the first IBM PC I saw in a store. The customers picked the $30 option instead of the $200 one, (or the $500 P-System).

Digital Research was locked into an existing customer base that had been paying a couple hundred bucks and if they had matched Billy's price all the Vectors and IMSAIs and all the other companies that had been building 8086 personal computers for a while would have demanded a rebate. It would have broken DR even faster than it did.

We can blame IBM for that #$%^& edge triggered interrupt system.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

Like IBM had bought 10% of Intel to get their memory technology. But then a year or so later Intel decided to get out of the memory business. Larkin is not the largest business Intel has pissed off.

Mark Zenier snipped-for-privacy@eskimo.com Googleproofaddress(account:mzenier provider:eskimo domain:com)

I remember in the mid 1980s, we had to use LeCroy's 8818 and 8828 digitizers (at a blazing 250 MSPS -- they were the fastest things available). They were constantly in the shop for repairs.

Tom

years ago I had a big budget for a whizz-bang scope. So I tried one of everything. The LeCroy scope crashed - the Amber screen of death. it was fun watching the salesman try and convince us a scope with dodgy software was worth $40,000

the other funny thing: one of my tests was to integrate and differentiate a sine wave, coming from an HP AWG. The LeCroy scope gave me a cosine that ramped oupwards fairly sharply; no other scope did this. We surmised it must be integrating its own offset error....

in the end I bought a philips 200MHz combiscope (the little green button was wonderful) and 3 channels of Tek current probes.

Cheers Terry

On Wed, 14 Jun 2006 14:32:46 GMT, Aratzio Gave us:

F*ck off, kook boy.

I did some work on vfc driver in linux/Sparc and was horrified by the kernel interfaces lack of abstraction and orthogonality. You could try the BSD family of operating systems they have the policy of "It rights, it works". Rather than "It works, it right" or "It's good enough" .. for the moment..

I find BSD systems be one of the most stable os so far.

IBM bought 30% of Intel to keep Intel afloat (then sold the stock to keep themselves afloat). IBM also gave Intel their Engineering Design System (which Intel had rewrite to make usable ;) so they could design something as complicated as a '286. The memory IP may have been in that deal, don't remember.

;-)

Yep. Billy knew how to fish.

OMG, yes. ...and a thousand other ISA faults. What a mess. RIP

If that wasn't their reason, it's hard to see why not. If IBM had gone 68008, our development PC wouldn't have existed. IOW, months after IBM _shipped_ a finished product, I *still* couldn't get the Motorola parts, or even a defined release date.

I even tarried a few agonizing months and sketched designs using both processors, hoping to give Motorola a chance to deliver. At the end of this period they slipped their delivery schedule (again), then later slipped yet again. I simply couldn't wait any longer.

Since the i8086 and MC68000 were both readily available, it seems fairly obvious that IBM had decided as a company they did NOT want the full 16-bit bus. I've seen excellent interviews with the original designers published in various magazines in which they speak for themselves, so I won't presume to psychoanalyze their motivations.

Cheers, James Arthur

IBM did try to sell a good bus system with the Microchannel but being proprietary, it never really took off. I still think the old PS/2s are the hardiest PC type machines ever built. I still have an almost quarter century old mod 70 running as a file/fax server. If it ever breaks I will get something newer for that application.

I doubt IBM saw the rise of the bloated software we are running on PCs. They were used to a medium sized business running their whole operation on a machine about as powerful as the PC-1 5150. In fact my wife ran her business on my old "first day ship" 5150. It was the advent of cartoon interfaces that drove the quest for speed.

Remember that the ISA bus was also proprietary. They published fairly complete specs in the user manuals, but it was still proprietary. In fact, if there were complete specs, they were kept quiet, since I seem to remember some early third-party boards were made that conformed to the spec in the manual, but didn't run in the machines.

ISA took over the world in spite of its inferiority, and was soon irreplaceable (until it was so far behind technologically that PCI could get a foothold). That's why PS/2 failed.

John Perry

I have a Model 70 that I should put into use somehow. What OS are you running on yours?

My earlier Model 50 (10-MHz 286) was remarkably RF-quiet. I was into shortwave listening at the time, and this was one of the few computers that didn't interfere seriously with the radio.

DOS 6.3 and WFWG 3.11

No, there was no spec at all. They published the circuit diagrams and if you wanted min/max timings etc in ns you had to do the math yourself based on circuit analysis and Intel/Moto/National data sheets.

I still have my hand-colorated PC/AT Technical Reference..

regards, Gerhard

It could be argued the other way; Moore's law allowed cartoon interfaces.

It did take off, though not on home PCs, which wasn't the intention. Not until PCI became readily available (and reliable) did MCA go away.

If you want an argument, you'll have to go elsewhere. ;-)

There weren't "complete specs". Note that EISA had the same compatibility problems, even though it was a "complete spec".

I'd argue that the PS/2 didn't fail.