On 26/10/2011 10:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
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.


So basically it was Intels smarts that said 'use an 8 bit bus on a 16
bit chip, and you have an unholy kludge of a thing that can churn out
better than a pure 8 bit processor can, today'

Yes to the first bit, but the kludginess of it meant that even decent
Z80 systems of the day would out perform it in most apps!

--
Cheers,

John.

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