begin quoting Andrew Lentvorski as of Mon, Aug 14, 2006 at 11:22:36PM -0700: > kelsey hudson wrote: [snip] > >only 3-4 spare IRQs for hardware that wasn't already in the box. How > >this architecture caught on I'll never know. > > Three letters ... > > I ... B ... M > > Nobody bought an "Intel". They bought an "IBM".
What amazes me is that IBM is seen as one of the good guys these days. > And, in fact, they didn't even really buy an "IBM". > > They bought "that thing that runs Lotus and WordPerfect". "...that I brought home from work..." Before 1990, every person I knew who owned an IBM PC did so for one reason -- to run software pirated from work. Often, this was Lotus and WordPerfect. > x86 was simply along for the ride. Good point. But the "evil consipiracy" theory is so much more emotionally satisfying. > And, to be fair, the x86 isn't that bad an architecture when you have to > draw the schematics by hand and cut rubylith with an xacto knife. The 8086? Yeah, I can buy that. > We judge the x86 architecture by what we know now; not by what they knew > then. No, there was plenty of judgement back then, too. Especially when we got away from 8-bit computing. -- _ |\_ \| -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
