Re: Cohen's paper on byte order

From: Lassi Hippeläinen (lahippel_at_ieee.orgasm-research.invalid)
Date: 04/30/03 

Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2003 08:47:41 GMT

Brian Gladman wrote:
>
> <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

The 68000 had two major marketing problems:
1) Its memory access timing was very tight. It wanted data as soon as
the address was out, unless you inserted wait states, which made the
processor slower than a 8086.
2) You can't design a system without peripheral circuits, and for 68000
they weren't anywhere around until it was too late. The 8086 could use
8080 circuits from the start.

-- Lassi