Stolen designs

Might have been just before your time, when the 64 kbit chips made semi memory really take off. IBM made an announcment that they were the first with a 64k chip, but the silicon valley outfits' chips were smaller/cheaper, faster, and only needed one power supply. It looked (from outside) that that was the point where IBM realized that they couldn't do it all by themselves, so they bought into Intel. (I worked for a semi equipment manufacturer and we got a tour of one of Intel's Oregon fab's back end (testing line) sometime in 1981. All sort of guys with IBM badges on running around the front end (fab) part of the plant).

Because the Japanese and Koreans were eating everybodies lunch...

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

Any way you slice it, I think it's still a fair statement that GUIs usually aren't the limiting factor in computer performance these days, but they have made PCs tremendously more accessible to the average person... something like the old CP/M WordStar or the DOS WordPerfect would *never* have passed the "Grandma" test, even though they were both good-quality, highly-capable programs for their day.

The lovely thing about all this power to make computers accessible is that it has resulted in excellent engineering machines being made available a price just about anyone can afford. Snappy floating-point and 3-D graphics for parametric CAD and number crunching ability for SPICE and other simulations. I'd sure hate to be stuck in the old days of sluggish CPUS and tiresome math co-processors.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Amen! I started out doing Spice 2G6 on a VAX780, all text-based :-(

...Jim Thompson

Bingo! Today's teenage gamer PC makes an excellent engineering workstation. I can remember when engineering workstations were strange, big, expensive things...

Saturation into a cartoon world with a cartoon-watching user based forced cartoon interfaces.

Machines made for gamers really have made engineering machines easy to come by for next to nothing!

saw

by

asfaik.

The Intersil (Siliconix?) 6500 line predates the Motorola 6800 line by over a year. There should not have been any lawsuits between them, the designs and instruction sets were far too different. I have used both.

Reverse of that.

This also fits with my recollections of the time.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

On 15 Jun 2006 09:02:09 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@spamnuke.ludd.luthdelete.se.invalid Gave us:

That's what Mac OS X is based on.

On Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:03:50 -0400, snipped-for-privacy@aol.com Gave us:

Due to the fact that it was proprietary... TOO proprietary. They even charged peripheral device makers to use it. Talk about scaring off your own customers...

Naaaahhh... Everex built the tanks.

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:09:12 -0400, Keith Gave us:

I knew we would figure out what you were sooner or later...

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 10:13:53 -0400, Keith Gave us:

But the micro-channel bus that is found on them did.

Wrong.

I started out doing circuit sim on an engineering model of a 360/85 with a 2741 (Selectric style) terminal with a 134.5baud acoustical coupler.

Yeah, I like Rocky and Bullwinkle too.

Gee, DimBulb, we never have to wait long for you to tell us what you are.

It was not in public so it would me my word against their $1M lawyers. I ended up using the Philips micro.

"They sprayed instructions around to cover their tracks" was said when it was introduced. Did once find a use for the ASCII adjust for (thing) instructions.

In article , Richard Henry wrote: [....]

I was driving a rented Ford Exploder for this last week. When I wanted the head lights on, I turned on the rear wiper.

I think it is becoming a safety issue. We really need a standard for where the important switches are.