🚀 go-pugleaf

> Previous article mentioned that IBM developed RISC chip is not available
> separately.

If IBM is up to their usual tricks, this (Proprietary RISC chip) is what
they hope will be come the "New Standard" in "PC's"!  Certainly effective
against the "Clone market"!  It's amazing how many DP administrators have
gone along with this too!  The one thing different this time is that
PC purchase decisions are/were made higher up.

Deja Vu?

(Inside jokes for those who have supported or bought IBM in the past)
The latest "Plug Compatible" - the 360!!!
The latest "Plug Compatible" - the 370!!!
Remember EDX?
Upgraded your Series 1 yet?
Which 370?
What bundling?
Upgrade or Replace?
Is it (PC-RT this week) IBM compatible?
IBM will change no rules before it's time!
And now for this years replacement for last years product...
Who's gonna tell the Pres. the IBM we bought last month is obsolete!

Seriously folks, when IBM says "We won't change the rules", that
fits in the same catagory as "The check is in the mail" or
"I won't !@# in your face".

Actually, to be fair, other manufacturers respond the same way.  Apple,
Commodore, and Atari upgraded their machines in response to IBM.  This
is just your normal competitive response.

When IBM came out with the PC, the value of a Series 1 deteriorated rapidly.
But the PC was an effective response against the CP/M desk-tops dominating
the market at the time.  MS-DOS may seem a bit "plain and vanilla" right
now, but the CP/M boxes were pretty much "Text Only" with little support
or standardization for even simple cursor positioning.  The boxes with
graphics relied on "Basic in Rom" operating systems so proprietary
they weren't even source code compatible.  Disk formats ranged from
35 track, single density, single sided to 96 track, quad density, double
sided with 1 16KB sector per track.  IBM eventually went with the
quad density floppy, but the 360K was reliable, provided reasonable
storage for "floppy only" systems.  The graphics hardware, mountable
drivers, interceptable interrupts, and "open architecture", opened the
doors to hardware and software technology that was only science fiction
as little as 2 years prior to its release.

MS-DOS (PC-DOS) boxed them in, competitors came out with better or lower cost
equivelant products and IBM is responding in their usual way.  IBM needed
a machine that would offer multi-tasking, VDI real-time graphics, high speed,
mass storage, and a large linear address space.  I would assume that the
68000 was considered too 'generic', and lacked the support (Memory
management, floating point, caching, video support circuitry, etc) to
be a candidate for a "dramatic new design".  A RISC chip also makes
bus sharing with very high resolution displays or very high speed DMA
peripherals and co-processors more practical as well.

Fortunately for IBM, the 68K boxes have not adopted any real "standards"
yet.  This leaves the market open for IBM to repeat the PC success again.
If the 68K producers get things together and adopt some standards in
OS, disk media formats, data interchange formats, and peripheral standards,
they might get IBM's underbelly the way DEC/UNIX/TAR prevented IBM from
cornering the mini market with the Series 1.  If Bell had gone with
MULTICS instead writing UNIX, the mini market might have gone to something
like a Series 1 and EDX environment.  Of course, to be competitive in
the consumer market, the 68K standard will have to be application object code
compatible (Since most micro owners don't get source for every application).