Timeline for Why was NEC able to wrestle PC graphics standards away from IBM?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 9, 2020 at 17:24 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | Regarding Xenix, it wasn’t available on x86 until after the PC was released, and even then not on the PC itself initially, but on an Altos. It was available earlier for other platforms. | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 17:22 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | The IBM PC review issue of Byte (January 1982) includes a Byteline titled How much faster are the 16-bit micros? which mentions the availability of multiple 8086/8088-based micros running CP/M-86 and/or MS BASIC, so there were at least some, apparently. The ads don’t paint the picture of a thriving ecosystem though (and the Kildall interview in PC Magazine suggests that the PC saved the x86!)... Perhaps the S100 perspective was different, I’m not familiar with that. | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 16:07 | comment | added | user_1818839 | Sorry, forgot to post the link referring to January 1981 (see below). Maybe November was when they released it for IBM PC? I have lost my Byte mags from that era but memory was that there were many 8086 systems and opinions were divided when the PC came out between "cool, IBM joined in" and "but it's only an 8088". I had forgotten : there was also Xenix (Microsoft!) as another option. If there was no ecosystem, what was it for? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 16:02 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | The stopgap that ended up becoming PC-DOS ;-). Wikipedia says November 1981 but the second printing of the CP/M-86 system guide is dated June 1981, so it seems likely it was available earlier. | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 15:41 | comment | added | user_1818839 | Substitutes for the OS were stopgaps, like the system from Seattle Computer Products, for their S100 bus system. But didn't CPM/86 actually ship in January 1981? Well and truly late, and not for the IBM PC of course, which was November or December. Wikipedia seems to bear this out. | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 15:24 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | Announced, yes, and it’s fair to imagine that some amount of CP/M-86 computers were being designed, but when the IBM PC was released, there was effectively no CP/M-86 ecosystem, was there? The Rainbow came out in 1982, as did the Vector 4; the CompuPro 8/16 in 1983, the Logica systems in 1984/1985, the TeleNova Compis in 1985. It certainly made sense for IBM to plan to use CP/M-86 on the PC, and they did, but I’m still wondering how accurate the “wide variety of hardware architectures” claim is (when the PC was released). | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 13:43 | comment | added | user_1818839 | It was announced a couple of years earlier, in 1979, and given the very strong track record of CP/M on existing 8-bit machines, designing for it in anticipation of a formal release looked like a no-brainer. Microsoft was "that 8K BASIC company" at the time. | |
| Mar 9, 2020 at 8:29 | comment | added | Stephen Kitt | I’m curious how your second paragraph works: CP/M-86 was released after the IBM PC, so surely when the IBM PC was released, there couldn’t already be a variety of hardware architectures based on the 8086 and compatible with CP/M-86... | |
| Mar 8, 2020 at 22:34 | history | answered | user_1818839 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |