Are you sure IBM didn't care about 8080 compatibility? The PC was released in August 1981, a full 4 years before any of the other machines you speak of. That XT 5160-078 you speak of is a cost-reduced model with no hard drive from IBM, allowing dealers to install a compatible hard drive from a different supplier.
By 1985, the PC AT (286) had already been out since August 1984. And the original XT was October of 1983. And the XT itself is literally the same as a PC with more expandability: 8 slots instead of 5, beefier PSU, room for a hard drive.
It's unclear if IBM or for that matter anyone would have been able to start designing a 68000-based machine and bring it to market by the fall of 1981. Sun brought the Sun 1 to market in May 1982, so about 9 months later, and with a much higher price.
And what did the Sun run? UNIX. What did IBM run? Quick ports of the last several years of CP/M software made possible because DOS 1 was specifically designed to implement a CP/M-like API, and the 8086 was specifically designed to allow porting of 8080 assembler code directly to small model 8086 code.
I picked 1985 specifically because of the Amiga/Atari 68000 machines, to show that it's not about price. Had Sun wanted to target the games-machine market, they could've designed for, built and sold a $600 machine based on a 68000 in 1981. Their pricing was because they went for the UNIX workstation market; they also designed and produced their own custom MMU because Motorola's 68851 didn't work correctly for them
Motorola were selling 68000s for $125 each. Steve Jobs talked them down to around $15 each. (Macintosh launch price: $2,495 in 1984) Memory model did not dictate price. Target market and vendor management did.
IBM would have been entirely capable of launching a TMS9900-based PC or a 68000-based PC, had these chips been in full production in 1978. The software and OS for the IBM PC was an afterthought, IBM settled on the CPU first. Had they picked the 68000, they'd have been contracting out for 68000-based OSes.
> Selection of a 16-bit microprocessor by the IBM team couldn’t have been much of a debate. The Motorola 68K, as it was later known, was undoubtedly the hands-down winner. It had the largest logical address space, which was even more important than the minimum 16-bit internal architecture. It was also easily expandable to a full-fledged 32-bit architecture.
> So why aren’t we all using 68K-based computers today? The answer comes back to being first to market. Intel’s 8088 may have been imperfect but at least it was ready, whereas the Motorola 68K was not. And IBM’s thorough component qualification process required that a manufacturer offer up thousands of “production released” samples of any new part so that IBM could perform life tests and other characterizations. IBM had hundreds of engineers doing quality assurance, but component qualifications take time. In the first half of 1978, Intel already had production-released samples of the 8088. By the end of 1978, Motorola’s 68K was still not quite ready for production release.
So it wasn't about architecture, and it wasn't even about price. It was about time-to-market. The 8088 was in full production and the 68000 was not quite there, at precisely the time IBM wanted to create a PC. The 8088 might've been even quicker to market had they left out the memory segmentation, but Intel had their own business reasons (wanting to sell to existing 8080 customers) for adding it.
Bribes are a feature of politically-controlled economies, not a bug.
Thirty years ago when this was all going down, I believed the narratives of the time. Greedy Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer pushing IBM's OS/2 out of the consumer market with aggressive DOS and Windows OEM deals.
I mean, they absolutely did do that, but I think the motivation was competitive survival.
The Steve Ballmer interview really shed a lot of light on this, particularly the portion about the IBM and Microsoft OS/2 divorce: https://youtu.be/CYC49_aeop0?t=1476
It was drop DTR. Most current documentation tells you that dropping DTR means the modem should hang up. That was an option, maybe even the default. But you could AT&D1 to make dropping DTR return you from data mode to command mode. It's so important there's even a DIP switch on the USR Courier to enable this mode.
I almost can't believe the USR site is still up. This is something I remember doing to run a BBS over 30 years ago. I still have my Courier with the brass not for resale plate.
I was disappointed when Microsoft dropped original WSL.
I'll admit I wasn't a Windows user at the time, nor since for that matter. But I had been before.
I knew the history of the "Windows Services for UNIX" and thought that it was incredibly interesting to have the Windows kernel, full driver support, NTFS, and the ability to just use Windows normally, but also be able to just do UNIX-type stuff more or less normally.
Which is what I've been doing on my Mac since the early 2000s.
Then Microsoft had to make Windows a complete shit-show. Not like it hasn't happened before, but they really got themselves in deep this time.
> Tbh, though, the only computer I've ever seen Hibernate work well on are Macs. Every x86 computer usually has some sort of issue with it, except for maybe business laptop models (eg HP's Elitebook line).
This has always been my experience, going back I'd say at least to the early 2000s on cheap laptops, and all the way back to the earliest days of sleep and hibernate on desktops, where sleep just doesn't matter that much.
When I started dabbling in boot code around 2006, I read a bunch of the specs and one of them was ACPI, which I only scratched the surface of.
I think until then it had just not occurred to me that a modern paged protected OS would even want to call into any code supplied with the computer, vs. having it come from a driver disk, or be built in to the kernel where everyone can see it.
The whole idea of a bytecode interpreter running random code supplied by a fly-by-night system builder is a little unsettling.
I've only had batteries leak in remotes left unused for over a year. I just pick up Duracell or whatever is at Costco.
I've also bought two replacement remotes off of Amazon in the past year, one Samsung and one Insignia. I think they were $15-20 each, which seemed very reasonable to me.
Generally they won't have the manufacturer's logo, but everything else on the outside looks 100% identical, and all the buttons worked.
Coke used to be mixed, bottled, and shipped out in an extremely quick timeframe. Inventory turned over fast.
I suspect the separated components wind up being equal to what a stale soda has, one that has been on the shelf. It’s like buying a soda whose sugar component has already gone stale.
Sure, the rest of the flavors are there and still fresh, unaffected by the carbonated water, but the sweetness one is off.
Whoever downvoted your comment has either never driven this stretch of the 5 or they are the reason it is so bad.
It’s the idiots in cars who insist on doing exactly 65 in the left lane next to a semi that cause the problem. Get past just one idiot holding back hundreds of cars and you will find miles of completely open road.
Its all of those rolling hills where you are going up and down over and over. People don't pay attention and let their car slow down up hills, then let their cars roll up to 90 going back down the other side. Do it over and over and you get the whole centepede effect, except cars far enough back have to practically stop.
Did people just forget the era of CD burning? Cassettes sucked.
Normal non-tech people were ripping CDs with iTunes. "Rip. Mix. Burn." was a nationwide if not worldwide advertisement.
All of this still works, if you have a CD drive.
If you're going to bother buying a cassette player... what's the allure for that over a CD-R and a basic CD player. CD players in cars are going away, but they're still around in houses and inexpensive small boomboxes.
But then... what's the allure of that over say any old audio player that takes SD cards or just a USB stick. A lot of modern cars and also stereo receivers and TVs will take a USB stick and play files from it. These players are incredibly prevalent and very easy to use. And loading the music from a computer or even a tablet is easy.
Of these three, cassette is the absolute least likely to be available anywhere.
You can still have the experience of making a playlist and even putting the files on a USB stick for someone. Importantly, they can actually play it on their own listening device.
CDs skip very easily so they're not good for portability. So that limits their use to in the house, and they're you're competing with vinyl. Cassette fill a niche in the nostalgia world being something you can more easily use on the go.
I had lots of CD and mp3-CD players with good anti-skip. Some would even buffer enough or the song to stop the CD for several seconds at a time, especially so on my later mp3/ATRAC CD players. The crappier ones added crappy audio compression to fit it's tiny memory, but better ones could do the raw data and had no (at least to me) loss in quality and later the mp3/ATRAC ones would just buffer the actual file data.
I don't think I've ever experienced a car CD player skipping due to shock. I'm sure it could happen, but I don't do much trail driving at high speeds personally.
I listened to my CD players while biking, hiking, and more. No reason to leave the CDs at home unless you already upgraded to one of those fancy hard drive mp3 players.
Yeah it was probably around 2003 I listened to all my music on MP3 CDs I made and it had like 30 seconds solid of buffering that I never managed to hit unless I sat their purposefully shaking my player in my hands to watch the buffer meter go down.
Cassettes get distorted too when moving (.e.g running). There’s very cool tech in some models that prevent this distortion but they are more expensive.
This is a time-tested winning strategy that too few corporate owners embrace.
When you look at some of the most well-known industrial companies, their founders basically did this.
Difficulty: give away too much of the company trying to raise capital and most investors won't let you do this. Of course, you aren't really the owner then anymore, are you?
I think that's the allure of effective altruism. You founded a company or were early enough in a company to have enough shares to sell to investors. Those investors want big returns. The company is now at their mercy, but hey, they gave you a pile of cash so you can spend it on feeling good.
By 1985, the PC AT (286) had already been out since August 1984. And the original XT was October of 1983. And the XT itself is literally the same as a PC with more expandability: 8 slots instead of 5, beefier PSU, room for a hard drive.
It's unclear if IBM or for that matter anyone would have been able to start designing a 68000-based machine and bring it to market by the fall of 1981. Sun brought the Sun 1 to market in May 1982, so about 9 months later, and with a much higher price.
And what did the Sun run? UNIX. What did IBM run? Quick ports of the last several years of CP/M software made possible because DOS 1 was specifically designed to implement a CP/M-like API, and the 8086 was specifically designed to allow porting of 8080 assembler code directly to small model 8086 code.
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