🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7MD152Axds13@ficc.uu.net> peter@ficc.uu.net (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Considering that the 68000 beat the pants off the
>80286, and it was only an accident that IBM used the 8086 family in the PC,
>it looks like Motorola was years ahead all the way. It's not until the 80386
>that Intel produced a chip as desirable as the old 68000.

Yeah, the 68000 was 32-bits internally and 16-bits externally (making it 
roughly equivalent to the 386SX, but of course without an MMU.)

That made the evolution of the 68000 series to full 32-bit parts trivial
from a software standpoint.  Most 68K code ran unmodified on the 68020 and
68030, and new compilers were not required to take advantage of their 
newly widened external busses.

Registers had to grow on the 80x86 series from the 8086 to the 286 to the 386, 
and the fact that almost every 286 and 386 ever sold is still running in 8086 
emulation mode is living proof that the 8086 family is not is easy to evolve 
through as the 68000, and that a *lot* of people are still having to pay for 
early MS-DOS design errors.  (for example that there was no BIOS call to write 
a string to the display, so programs did it directly for speed, and no early, 
articulated-to-developers plan for evolving to multitasking.)
-- 
-- uunet!ficc!karl "...as long as there is a Legion of super-Heroes, 
   uunet!sugar!karl       all else can surely be made right."   -- Sensor Girl