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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: GIMP 3.0.0-RC1
Date: 12 Jan 2025 02:33:27 GMT
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On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 21:57:29 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:

> rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 11 Jan 2025 12:06:05 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>> 
>>> On 10/01/2025 22:15, rbowman wrote:
>>>> On Fri, 10 Jan 2025 07:27:06 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> The natural tendency in a free market is that the best technology
>>>>> rises to the top, becomes ubiquitous, and everybody uses it.
>>>>> Diversity in technology is not desirable,. Diversity in its
>>>>> application is, somewhat.
>>>> 
>>>> Like natural selection I would say an adequate technology rises to
>>>> the top, not always the best.
>>> 
>>> Well it depends on what 'best' applies to.
>>> 
>>> Take VHS - technically inferior to Betamax but best marketed.
>> 
>> I had that in mind -- along with the 8088 processors and MSDOS. IBM had
>> used the 8085 in the System 23 so were familiar with Intel and wanted
>> to use readily available and inexpensive 8-bit peripherals in a product
>> they didn't really believe in. And here we are.
> 
> Other reasons that have been reported are:
> 
> 1) IBM required any "outside IBM" chips to be second sourced.  Intel
> already had AMD as an official licenced second source for the 8088 chip,
> Motorola did not (yet) have any second source for the 68000.
> 
> 2) Intel had the chip on the market, and could supply the production
> volume (or so they claimed to IBM) IBM wanted.  Motorola had
> "pre-production" versions of the 68000 available for 'breadboarding'
> but it had not yet entered full production at the time IBM was selecting
> a CPU to use (and IIRC, was not planned to enter full production until
> after IBM had planned to release their new "PC").

Both are believable. Even for the older microcontrollers Motorola had a 
bad reputation for hanging you out to dry if they reverted to their roots 
and got an order for millions of pieces from the automotive industry.

Another rumor at the time is IBM was in a pissing contest with Exxon. 
Exxon had bought Zilog so the Z8000 was out.

There may have been other reasons also but it did start us down the path 
with a chip Intel saw as an interim solution until they got the 432 going. 
That, of course, never happened so more bandaids were applied to the 8086.