bnfb@june.cs.washington.edu (Bjorn Freeman-Benson) (02/09/88)
Here's the way I heard it, from the mouth of Mr. X himself... IBM was designing a PC. It had to have floating point support in a chip. They were using an Intel FP chip and a Z80. They couldn't get it to work. They called Intel. Intel sent down Mr. X, a tech support salestype, to help them. He said, "why not use an 8086? Look how it matches our FP chip so nicely." They said, "we must have only 8 bits." He erased eight data lines and said "oh! you want the 8088". And it was done... Bjorn N. Freeman-Benson