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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: the 286, Byte ordering
Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2025 20:01:25 -0000 (UTC)
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According to Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at>:
>Anyway, while Zilog may have taken their sales, I very much believe
>that Intel was aware of the general-purpose computing market, and the
>iAPX432 clearly showed that they wanted to be dominant there.  It's an
>irony of history that the 8086/8088 actually went where the action
>was.

I have heard that the IBM PC was originally designed with a Z80, and fairly late
in the process someone decided (not unreasonably) that it wouldn't be different
enough from all the other Z80 boxes to be an interesting product. They wanted a
16 bit processor but for time and money reasons they stayed with the 8 bit bus
they already had. The options were 68008 and 8088. Moto was only shipping
samples of the 68008 while Intel could provide 8088 in quantity, so they went
with the 8088.

If Moto had been a little farther along, the history of the PC industry
could have been quite different.
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly