Re: Cohen's paper on byte order

From: Brian Gladman (fake_at_nowhere.org)
Date: 04/30/03 

Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 09:17:52 +0100

<jsavard@ecn.ab.ca> wrote in message news:CxHra.470$MW.49007@localhost...
> Douglas A. Gwyn (DAGwyn@null.net) wrote:
> : jsavard@ecn.ab.ca wrote:

[snip]
> Intel happened, of course, to have the 8088 available, while Motorola
> didn't see the point of a 68008 until later. It is a happenstance that
> gave Intel a giant market for its chips, giving it the money to finance
> R&D expenditures no one else can match. Sadly, neither the Amiga nor the
> Atari ST took off explosively; but then, they weren't open systems, like
> the IBM PC and the Apple II, so that may not have meant all that much,
> even if they had.

Having watched this scene over more than thirty years, my own theory is that
engineering elegance and market dominance are very often mutually exclusive
in the computing world.

For example, the Motorola 68000 has the most exquisite instruction set
whereas the Intel x86 instruction set is a complete abomination (they happen
to be big and liitle endian but that is a different point). So I considered
it inevitable that the x86 would become dominant.

   Brian Gladman

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