The 80XXX series was far from the best. It was successful solely
because the largest computer company in the world chose it.
The saying back then was "You can never go wrong buying IBM"
The original PC was really not a very good machine, especially not for
more then $5,000. It was three programs that made is useful. Wordstar,
Visicalc (later Lotus 123) and DBASE II.
IBM chose the 8088 because the 68000 was nearly equivalent to the 360 at
the time and the NS32000 wasn't in silicon yet.
On 6/14/2026 8:00 PM, Murray McCullough via cctalk wrote:
What role does the duopoly, Intel/Microsoft, play in the success of the
earlier years of the 8086? When choice is restricted sometimes the best
isn't the most successful!
Happy computing,
Murray 🙂
On Sun, Jun 14, 2026 at 8:19 PM Fred Cisin via cctalk <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Sun, 14 Jun 2026, Johan Helsingius via cctalk wrote:
Have you tried to run an early 8086/8088 binary on any modern Intel
processor?
The sole advantage of Intel's approach, is by making each one a hodgepodge
of kludges from its predecessor, rather that a thorough redesign from
scratch, is that less work was required to modify programs for the next
one.
Obviously starting over with a complete redesign makes for a much better
final product, but longer delays to port software.
8086/8088 binary required VERY few changes to run up through Pentium.
Micropro (later Wordstar International) ported Wordstar from 8080 to 8088
in about two weeks!
It then took them much longer than that to revise the manuals. (Would
using a different word processor have sped that up? :-)
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred [email protected]
