On 26/10/2011 10:03, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead,
or even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

The 8088 certainly was, since it could share many of the same
peripherals including the 8259 PIC, 8250 UART, 8254 PIT etc.

Apple went for the 6502 IIRC

For their early machines, yup.

I don't think many people used 6809, although it had a simple clean

It made it into a few commercial systems. Tandy Color Computer and
Dragon 32/64 being the most notable.

instruction set, so the 68000 was not anybodies first choice...but I

The fact that the cheap to interface 68008 was not produced until later
probably hindered takeup more than anything, since the external 16 bit
bus width forced use of more expensive memory interfaces etc. (they
probably figured you would use a 6800 chip if you wanted and 8 bit system

think it was closer to the 6502 and the woz probably understood memory
mapped I/O better so that was what came next maybe.

I admit I know not a lot about early apples..


--
Cheers,

John.

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