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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: J_F_Shepard who wrote (446521)	1/10/2009 3:14:04 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1575354

"Arguable....but only one survived and dominated." Not at all arguable. The 68000 ate 8086 for breakfast. The 8086 was a quick and dirty design, thought up because the iAPX432 was so slow in development. It basically extended the 8080 architecture to 16 bits. Complete with the warts. Coding in assembly was an exercise that made you want to claw out your eyes, especially if you wanted to access more than 64k of memory. Segments were the spawn of Satan... Intel's excuse was they wanted to support a memory model like DEC had with the PDP-11. By "using the hardware and a little bit of code" was their mantra. They lied. The "little bit" of code required, wasn't. And, since Messy DOS wasn't much more than a fancy program loader, any memory management had to be done by the applications. Which meant it wasn't done because most of the application programmers knew zip about how to write a memory manager. FWIW, Intel trotted out the same idea for the 80286. It had most of the support needed for virtual memory, just add a little bit of code. They lied again. And there still was the DOS problem. They eventually wised up with the 386. Nope, the 68000 was a far better processor.