andrew@frip.gwd.tek.com (Andrew Klossner) (02/23/88)
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"The 68000 didn't end up in the IBM pc, much as we would have
liked to have had it, because, as someone correctly pointed
out: it wasnt available in the time frame that IBM needed and
they thought that the 6809 didnt have enough performance."
I think the explanations I heard during the PC's introduction were more
telling: the 8088 assembler is close to source code compatible with the
8080, so a large body of CP/M software could be quickly ported to the
PC. There was quite a bit of established 8-bit software in 1981 (e.g.,
Wordstar, dBASE, the Microsoft languages) which popped up in 8088 code
very quickly ... usually with the same quirks and bugs.
-=- Andrew Klossner (decvax!tektronix!tekecs!andrew) [UUCP]
(andrew%tekecs.tek.com@relay.cs.net) [ARPA]