New answers tagged ibm-pc
3
The story comes I believe from the IBM Scientific Computer being developed by in the late 70's/early 80's at IBM Hursley Research in the UK.
This was a substantial 68000 based workhorse compared with the original IBM PC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_System_9000
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IBM already had an extensive history of using Intel chips in its products and had also acquired the rights to manufacture the 8086 family from Intel for its hardware. Intel wanted to build its own computers.
However, due to competition from Japanese manufacturers, who were able to undercut costs, Intel abandoned the market and focused solely on ...
25
One reason that has not been mentioned is that the memory and speed of the PC placed it in the ballpark of CP/M systems rather than UNIX systems (already available at the time). At this time there was a reasonably thriving market of CP/M office systems, and in spite of almost all of them being run by variants of the Z80 processor, much of the application ...
40
Several CPUs were considered. Essentially all 16 bit CPU of the time:
TI's 9900,
Motorola's 68000,
Zilog's Z8000 and
Intel 8086/88
This IEEE Spectrum article sheds some light on the development, at least for 68k, 9900 and 8088 (*1,*2).
In the end,it came down to a combination of factors:
TI's 9900 was single source, IBM didn't want a lock in.
Motorola's ...
9
The main factor could be the availability of the 8-bit data bus version of those CPUs. 68008 came to the market in 1982, but 8088 in 1979.
The 8-bit version was important because peripherals (memories etc.) had only 8-bit wide data buses those days; change to full 16-bit could be very expensive.
So those "crippled" versions were important mid-step ...
4
Without detailed sales and usage figures, “the most common” is probably impossible to answer, and even considering only the 8087, the answer depends on “when” — reasons to buy 8087s changed as programs using it became available.
The more open plural variant of your question is largely answered in the question.
Byte’s 1984 “Guide to the IBM PCs” gives a good ...
6
You need to understand that using the 8087 was effectively "free" for the developers and for the users. You linked in a floating point library that determined the existence of the 8087, and if it was there, it used it. If not it fell back to a software method. This means that the users don't have to do anything special to their code to leverage it. ...
2
Many database programs, including later versions of dBase and Paradox, provided features beyond simple database table storage lookup. They could generate tables dynamically, and also had programming languages that enabled open-ended calculations and report generation.
Some people used them somewhat like spreadsheets, or where one might use a statistics or ...
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We are a computer museum here in the Northwest, we were going to open up in August but unfortunately have had to push it forward because of the Covid. We are looking for magazines to put into our museum and also in the Internet Cafe. We would love to take them for our museum which is called Northwest Computer Museum/Workshops in Leigh. Website is www....
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The main means of thermal dissipation are convection and radiation (and flow). Convection is used always and independent of orientation. Board setup of the era have been made in any direction.
Putting boards close and in parallel is, independent of orientation, not a great idea at first, as they heat each other (by radiation). This means for thermal ...
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Simply put, for most of the PC's history, either the components were roughly uniform in their power consumption (with the major offenders typically being the 12V motors in disk drives, rather than anything solid-state), or the CPU was the major power consumer and thus source of heat. Only fairly recently has one particular type of expansion card, namely the ...
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Does the Harris 80C286 have any difference in behaviour from an Intel 80286 as far as the programmer is concerned?
The Harris/Intersil/Renesas 80C286 is, like its 80C86 predecessor fully compatible with its NMOS brother. In fact, it fulfils as well all electrical parameters (voltage, thresholds, lead timing), except of course current and thus power ...
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