bert@helix.nih.gov (Bert Tyler) (02/16/91)
> Another story I heard is that IBM had three design teams in an internal > competition to design their first PC. Two teams based their designs on > the MC68000, the third on the 8088. One design was picked. :-( > Can/will some better-informed person or persons elaborate? Remember that IBM is a very conservative company, engineering-wise. When IBM was selecting the microprocessor for the PC back in the design phase in early 1981, the Motorola 68000 was *not* in production (it was barely sampling) and there was no guarantee that it was going to be delivered on time. The 8088/80866 was already shipping in volume, and IBM's DisplayWriter already used the 8086 chipset, so it was a known quantity. In fact, the very first breadboarded PC motherboard (not the production version by a long shot) was a re-wrapped DisplayWriter motherboard. Besides, with an 8088 you could easily have 64K of code *and* 64K of data, and who would have ever thought that a PC would need more than 128K of memory <grin>? Seriously, remember all the hoopla when the PC first came out, and everybody said that it was silly to have a machine with more RAM than the capacity of a floppy disk? The competition at the time was *not* the 68000-based Lisa/Macs, which didn't show up for years. The competition was the 6502-based Apple II and the Z80-based Tandy. IBM made a good, solid decision for the time. Still, it's nice to wonder what the PC world would look like now if... > The story I heard regarding the choice of the 6502 was that Steve > Wozniak (who designed the Apple II by himself, sans committee) was > going to use the Z-80 (MUCH better choice, IMHO) but changed his mind > because 6502s were cheaper. Expense was a *big* consideration at the time - remember, we are talking about two kids in a converted garage who expected to sell a grand total of 50 Apple IIs. As I recall, Steve could get the Z80 for about $20.00 in those quantities, but the 6502 for about $2.50, and that's why he decided on the 6502. $1000 represented *huge* money to those guys back then. Still, he did alright with the results <grin>.