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Technology Stocks : Advanced Micro Devices - Moderated (AMD)
AMD 217.91+0.9%Dec 5 9:30 AM EST
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To: Elmer who wrote (71034)2/8/2002 1:25:18 AM
From: dale_laroyRead Replies (1) of 275872
 
>The 286 was out years before the 386 and IBM went so far as to license the i386 from Intel once it came out.<

Congratulations on catching this.

Back about a decade ago, I had the opportunity to man a booth near an IBM booth.

At that time I presented my theory that IBM saw the Motorola 68000 as a threat to their minicomputer business, and therefore decided to attempt to derail the 68000 by choosing an alternative 16-bit processor, thus diverting the entire industry away from Motorola's architecture through tempting them into cloning IBM's alternative, just as manufacturers were cloning IBM's System 370 (and 3090) series mainframes. The 8088 did not win on its own merits however. It wasn't until Intel threw in the kicker of the marvelously brain damaged 80286 that IBM decided this was the architecture to embrace. Thus was born the IBM PC and later the IBM PC AT.

Unfortunately, the i386 was not nearly as brain damaged as the 286. Indeed, it was a quite powerful processor that IBM viewed as a real threat to their minicomputer business. Thus, not only did IBM refuse to embrace the 386, they sold all their stock in Intel and badgered Microsoft into writing and marketing the 286 version of OS/2 before the 386 version. This is what I mean by going with the 286 instead of the 386.

Anyway, this IBM employee who was manning the IBM booth responded by say it was a good theory, but nobody at IBM was smart enough to come up with this strategy.
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