4859795
story
Comments: 806 +- Hardware: Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes on Monday June 15 2009, @09:45AM
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topichardware.gif); width:64px; height:55px;
hardware
Harry writes "Once upon a time, it wasn't a given that PC owners should be able to format their own floppy disks. Or that ports should be standard, not proprietary. Or that it was a lousy idea to hardwire a PC's AC adapter, or to put the power supply in the printer so that a printer failure rendered the PC unusable, too. Over at Technologizer, Benj Edwards has taken a look at some of the worst design decisions from personal computing's early years — including ones involving famous flops such as the PCJr, obscure failures such as Mattel's Aquarius, and machines that succeeded despite flaws, like the first Mac. In most instances — but not all — their bad decisions taught the rest of the industry not to make the same errors again."
Related Stories
Submission: Fifteen Classic PC Design Mistakes by Anonymous Coward
Try not.
Do.
Or do not.
There is no try.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.
Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
Patents and proprietary, closed standards -- Open standards lead to innovation and better hardware for consumers. Look at some of the junk in that article... Engineers need the challenge of having other people improve upon their ideas. Open standards and open-source *will* win because people work best working together. Capitalism certainly won't die but it needs to learn this lesson.
Honourable Mention: Keyboards -- Most computer keyboards are designed for some other lifeform -- one with a single arm bearing 10 or more fingers. Consumers accept the familiar "conventional" keyboard because it's familiar and conventional. The keyboards that are best for human beings have a "split" or curve in the centre. There are many horrible keyboards, so I'd like to mention some excellent ones:
GoldTouch
Adesso Ergonomic
original Microsoft Natural (not the later rubbish that claimed to be "ergonomic" just because it had a fake leather wrist support -- while maintaining the straight-row key configuration that is bad for wrists)
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
> original Microsoft Natural
That was a great keyboard back in 96! I would demonstrate a simple proof to others to show the benefit of its ergonomics:
* Stand up. Put your hands by your sides. Notice the angle of your hands.
* Now raise your hands up, keeping your biceps in place, and making an L, as if you were shaking hands.
* Now roll both of your hands inward, as if you were to play a wide piano. Seem how comfortable that is?
* Now slide your hands together so your thumbs are touching. Notice how awkward that is?
Took me a little while to get used to it, but it was good. My only problem was that the Y,H,and N keys (quite logically) were put on the right side. I'm a pretty hard-core gamer that uses most of the left side + partial right side of the keyboard, and found those keys "missing." (I used the right hand on the mouse.)
I wish someone would bring it back, duplicating the TY, GH, NM keys on both the left and right side.
--
"Necessity is the mother of invention,
but Curiosity is the Father."
-- Michaelangel007
Parent
It too, has a single tragic design flaw (Score:5, Interesting)
Here is an article with a picture of one. [pctechguide.com]
I'm a touch typist, took a class in it in high school. Fingers on the home keys. Left hand rests on ASDF. Right hand on JKL;.
If you move up a row from ASDF, you get QWER. My left pinky is A, move up 1 to Q. My right pointer is on F, move up 1 row to R.
Move up to the next row for numbers. ASDF becomes 1234. Now here's where we get to the mistake. We were taught that your left pointer goes up 2, and towards the middle 1 to get to 5. Likewise, your right pointer goes up 2 and over to the middle one 1 to get to 6.
Notice how the 6 is on the wrong side? When my brain thinks "6", my right pointer wants to see it right next to the 7. It's now the responsibility of my left pointer to be in charge of 456, and my right pointer is now only in charge of 7.
I can't tell you how frustrating this keyboard is to a touch typing programmer. It's as if nobody at Microsoft knows how to touch type.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Interesting)
I wish someone would bring it back, duplicating the TY, GH, NM keys on both the left and right side.
This. Very, very, very THIS. Please. And hurry...
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
Nevermind the display port.
They are back to the "no user serviceable parts" mantra.
Sure you can upgrade a mini if you are sufficiently stubborn.
However, it's a process where you will find yourself applying
a putty knife to your pretty little Mac.
Frankly I don't think most Apple users are up to that sort of
thing.
The thing is a glorified headless laptop anyways. Why didn't they
just take that idea to it's logical conclusion and have expansion
panels like real laptops do?
This is especially problematic since minis historically came with
too little memory as Mac in general have. This is why I personally
know the joys of upgrading a mini.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just Apple that charges such a large amount for better parts. Dell (whose computers you can easily upgrade on your own) has prices on upgrade parts that are much higher than retail.
For example, a base model Vostro desktop lists the Core 2 Duo E8600 as an upgrade (over the Celeron 450) for $330; the E8600 can be bought [mwave.com] for $267.99 with free shipping. Dell lists their 21.5" HD monitors for $260; I recently bought two Samsung 21.5" HD monitors for $189.99 each [newegg.com] (with free shipping, and there are rebates available). Dell will upgrade your baseline Vostro from 1GB to 4GB of 800MHz DDR2 for $112; it's not hard [mwave.com] to find 4GB kits for anywhere between $40.99 and $76.99, depending on what brand you prefer. On the same machine Dell will upgrade your 80GB hard drive to a 1TB 7200RPM hard drive for $330; Seagate 1TB drives can be had [mwave.com] for as little as $89.99.
(Those aren't affiliate links, don't worry :P)
If you were to get those upgrades, Dell's markup over retail prices is as much as $400, and they pay OEM price, not retail. (To be fair, the hard drive I linked above to is OEM, not retail.)
These days, I see very little reason to buy a desktop from Dell (or Apple or whoever) unless you're buying a laptop - and even then, you shouldn't have the vendor upgrade your RAM. I bought 4GB RAM for my laptop for $20 (after rebate), where Dell would have charged me $200. (Ironically, the RAM was marketed as "for Macs", despite being standard DDR2 SODIMM.)
As a humorous side note, if you want Dell to preconfigure RAID on a pair of 1TB drives, they'll do RAID-0 for $350 or RAID-1 for $250... same hardware, different price. Fun fun fun.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, what he is pointing out is why the "Hackintosh" will continue to be a thorn in the side of Apple, and that is the fact that they have no mid priced towers. There are many like the above poster and myself who have NO need for yet another laptop, but with Apple your only choices are a laptop, the ridiculous mini, the stupid "throw away your monitor when you need to upgrade" Imac or the total overkill that is the Mac pro line. the reasons companies keep coming up with "Hackintoshes" is because it is pretty obvious there is a market for a mid priced Apple tower with a little expandability, yet Apple refuses to serve that market, hence "Hackintosh". Which is really fricking stupid when you think about it, as since they have switched to Intel it would be trivial for Apple to come up with a design to serve this market. oh well, one more reason for me to stick with XP X64.
As a repair guy I'd like to add my own vote for worst design, and that is the HP/Compaq mini towers, or as we in the biz call them the "bloody knucklebusters". If you want you hands to look like you have been punching a concrete wall, just work on one of those bastards for a few hours. They are also some of the worst designs I have ever seen as far as cooling, and pretty much the ONLY way I have found to keep some of the Pavilion designs from overheating is what my former boss called "white trash cooling" which is yanking the side off and putting a $10 box fan beside it. They use proprietary connectors, proprietary drive cages, and are generally a giant royal PITA. A truly shitty design if ever I saw one.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Interesting)
...or the total overkill that is the Mac pro line...
As someone who also got bit by Apple's non-user serviceable part philosophy, I agree with you 100%.
I've got a Mac Pro. I'm not an Apple fanboi, I just hate them less than other computer manufacturers. My computer works great. But I didn't get the wireless card installed when I purchased it because I didn't need it. Later on, I needed the wireless capability, so I tried to buy the Airport Extreme card from Apple. The fuckers (yes, they are fuckers) wouldn't sell it to me because "it was not a user installable part." I had to make an appointment at my "local" Apple store that is 60 miles away to let some teenage "genius" install it for me. Yeah, OK, I'll get right on that, because I really want to drive my expensive 90-lb machine 120 miles on my day off so some 13-year-old-looking smartass can paw at it.
Instead, I bought it off a third-party vendor and worked out how to install it myself, since the only instruction it came with said "This is not a user installable part, please refer to the Mac Pro service manual for installation." It worked fine and I now have wireless capability, but I found Apple's actions with that upgrade really insulting.
If I am willing to pony up $4000 for a computer, chances are I have the necessary intellect and experience to screw a wireless card to my motherboard and plug in two antennas. Or I am willing to accept the consequences of my actions if I screw up. Why would a company make it hard for a consumer to use their product?
Apple's increasingly common philosophy of non-user serviceable parts, lack of mid-range user-upgradable towers, and forcing weird connectors down our throats without including the adapters for free are annoying and I think, ultimately, holding them back in the PC market. Window's recent suckage has been working to Apple's advantage, but I feel they could have capitalized on it more effectively. Of course, I am sure that Steve and his financial analysts have determined otherwise.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, DisplayPort isn't proprietary, it's the successor to DVI. Mini-DisplayPort is part of the VESA specification and is entirely royalty-free.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
If the spec is open, isn't it, by definition, not proprietary?
It's like claiming Linux is proprietary because you down have GCC? The Spec is open. No patents or licenses are preventing you from making your own display port. You just don't have the means necessary.
Heck, by that 'definition' VGA, DVI, etc are all "proprietary" too. Just because you can't make it or buy it at best buy, doesn't mean that it's proprietary.
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Informative)
DisplayPort IS an open standard [wikipedia.org]. Mini Display Port is added to the 1.2 specification. You can look up all the wiring for the pins, making IT NOT PROPRIETARY.
Apple was literally the first company to put these out. So for a short time there was only 1 place to buy them.
You can get cables from Monoprice and any of a dozen online retailers. Right now you can get DisplayPort connectors from DigiKey and I imagine once 1.2 is fully adopted , that you'll probably have no problem finding Mini DisplayPort connectors at Digikey.
Again, how is (Mini) Display Port any more proprietary than VGA, DVI, HDMI?
Parent
Re:Worst Mistake That Still Needs Fixing (Score:5, Insightful)
I was never discussing open versus closed standards. This is about proprietary versus standard.
That's why he argued with you the whole time. You're using 'proprietary' to mean 'uncommon'.
Your point's valid, you're just using the wrong term.
Parent
Apple's fascination with single button mice (Score:4, Insightful)
Having to press a key on the keyboard and click has got to be the most entertaining solution I have seen as 'good' in a long time.
I think it is funny the genius bar people practically tell people to get a microsoft mouse.
multiple cable speaker systems, its about time we had a single cable solution for attached speakers that provided easy to implement separation of channels. USB for everything please, or something similar.
Parent
One classic web design mistake (Score:5, Funny)
The 15 problems (Score:5, Informative)
Problem #1: No Power Supply Fan
Problem #2: Limited Apple II Compatibility
Problem #3: No Way to Format Disks
Problem #4: EM Pulse Erases Tapes
Problem #5: Printer Required
Problem #6: Rubber Keyboard
Problem #7: Non-Detachable AC Adapter
Problem #8: Miserable Keyboard
Problem #10: Sidecar Expansion
Problem #11: No User Expandability
Problem #12: Slow BASIC
Problem #13: Sidecar Expansion
Problem #14: Bulky Expansion Modules
Problem #15: Unreliable Proprietary Disk Drives
Re:The 15 problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The 15 problems (Score:5, Informative)
That design flaw wasn't introduced when the Mac came out, it was when they first moved from 68000 to PowerPC [wikipedia.org]. Older Macs from the XL through to the Classic II had the power button on the keyboard or tucked away somewhere out of sight on the monitor/base.
Parent
Re:The 15 problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Removing the eject button was a good idea; it prevented you from ejecting a disk without unmounting it and ending up with corrupted date.
Removing the eject button was an idiotic idea, and it illustrates one of the great failures of personal computer design philosophy - the idea that the system builder/designer knows better than the user how the user should use the system. If I want to eject a disk in the middle of an operation then I should be able to - maybe the possibility of corruption is preferable to the alternative of letting an operation continue. Maybe an electrical fire just started in the system power supply, and I want to get my floppy out NOW. Maybe a million things that the designer didn't think of. The assumption that the user is an idiot and doesn't know what they are doing, and that their control over the system must be severely limited for their own protection, is the single worst PC design mistake.
Parent
Re:The 15 problems (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:The 15 problems (Score:5, Insightful)
And to be honest, were those bulky expansions really design mistakes or do they just seem that way now that we have the benefit of a couple of decades of experience and design put into the problems they were meant to address?
I'd have a hard time seeing USB coming out back in the era being described, and not just because every company was doing it's best to lock people into their own platform.
Parent
Big ISA bus flaw (Score:5, Interesting)
IOCHRDY signal is active high instead of active low. Causes no end of problems.
Re: The 15 problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem #16: Blindingly intense blue LED on my new Dell that blinks when the computer is asleep.
All night long the computer constantly warns me: "I'm asleep. I'm asleep. I'm asleep." It's like Homer Simpson's "everything is OK" alarm.
Low-tech solution (Score:5, Insightful)
1 square inch of Scotch brand #33 electrical tape.
Parent
Re: The 15 problems (Score:5, Funny)
I have two DVD players that have a helpful little red LED that lets me know the device is off.
Seriously. When I turn the player on, the LED goes off.
Parent
CapsLock (Score:4, Insightful)
Sun got it right on their keyboard design, but everyone else kept the CapsLock key. I've been using computers for 21 years, and I use Ctrl constantly. I do not recall ever having used the CapsLock key (except out of curiousity to see whether it actually does anything.)
(Well, that's a bit of a lie. Of course I use it, after reassigning it to Ctrl. But the point is, having to take that step is a waste of time.)
CapsLock was useful once upon a time, when there was no \section{} or \textbf{}, and when pressing `shift' actually required strenght. But those days are gone.
Re:CapsLock (Score:4, Insightful)
There are still limited instances when CapsLock is useful. I work in a hospital and our MediTech program requires all caps. (Don't ask me why.) Like you mentioned, you can get keyboard remapping programs to turn CapsLock into another key. Still, I can see your point and it would be nicer if the CapsLock functionality was incorporated without needing a whole key. Say, for example, by pressing the Shift key twice or three times in rapid succession.
And while we're on the subject, does anyone use Num Lock or Pause anymore?
Parent
worst: sharp unfinished inside edges in cheap case (Score:5, Interesting)
My personal list...
- 15 to 10 years ago, you had to be careful when installing drives, or RAM. You could almost slice your hand on a cheap case that had unfinished and sharp edges.
- Beige Only. You can pick any color, as long as it is beige. Why did it take so bloody long to offer any other color then beige? Critical mass?
- LOUD systems. Have to thank George for showing me just how nice a quiet system is.
- Power hunger systems. 2 molex connections for a GPU ?!
- Crap 3D Video cards in laptops, and almost no benchmarks from the "classic" hardware review sites so you know how bad it sucks compared to a "real" GPU. (Thankfully the S3 Virge is gone from desktops, but laptops are still stuck with poor performance unless you pay an arm and a leg.)
--
"World of Warcraft (TM) is the McDonalds (TM) of MMOs."
-- Michaelangel007
The worst-designed case component... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The worst-designed case component... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
#1 failure... (Score:5, Insightful)
the choice of IBM to use the 8086 CPU. It set back the computer industry several years. The PC would now be at least 2 generations ahead if IBM did not use the retarded 8086 design.
Obviously, IBM did not believe in personal computers and thought they were gimmicks.
Re:#1 failure... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why? What other processor(s) should have been used, and what would have been the benefits? No, not trolling. Just interested in what you said and would like more information.
Parent
Re:#1 failure... (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:#1 failure... (Score:5, Funny)
Slashdot Uber Tech Society
You mean SLUTS? Sorry - couldn't help myself...
Parent
Re:#1 failure... (Score:5, Informative)
Why? What other processor(s) should have been used, and what would have been the benefits? No, not trolling. Just interested in what you said and would like more information.
The fundamental problem with Intel's instruction set architecture for the 8088/8086 line was that it was complex and intricate. To perform some instructions, the arguments had to be in very specific registers. Every register was, in some way or another, special purpose. The contemporary Motorola architecture, based on the 6800 and extended into the 68000 line, was completely the opposite: every register was, more-or-less, general purpose.
Writing a compiler for the Intel architecture is an exercise in masochism. Writing one for the Motorola architecture is one of simplicity and elegance. The Motorola instruction set documentation of the era was simple, clean, and definitive: it molded the way instruction sets were documented for generations afterward. The Intel documentation was difficult to understand at best.
One of the stark differences in the two instruction sets was the difference in instruction length variability. Intel instructions could be almost arbitrarily long. Motorola instructions were one or two bytes, with the one byte instructions being the ones most frequently used (inspired brilliance, that was). Also, for very related reasons, the number of cycles to execute an instruction was highly variable for Intel architectures, and more-or-less fixed for Motorola architectures.
I wrote assembly code for both architectures, back in the day. I hated, hated, hated writing for Intel chips, and breathed a sigh of relief whenever writing for Motorola chips. The inherent beauty in the Motorola instruction set created a certain kind of transparency making it possible --- seriously --- to see programmer intent when reading assembly code. With Intel chips, that was just not possible. With Motorola chips, you could reverse engineer code pretty easily; with Intel chips, it was painful.
The world would be a better place if IBM had selected Motorola.
Parent
BS! Re:I don't agree (Score:5, Interesting)
I was programming in x86 assembler (by necessity - not choice) at the time and the X86 instruction set sucks big time. The 68000 was far easier. No programmer worth his salt would choose X86.
The X86 still used 32 bits for the address but they overlapped the two 16 bit pieces so there were many ways to form the same address. It was INSANE!
IBM missed the boat, created a major competitor in the process and short themselves in the foot many times as a result. About all that saved IBM's PC bacon back then was that they had a lot of feet to shoot at.
IMHO when I read the article - its great. It shows how the rush to market can put a company out of business real quick.
BTW, I looked at the Lisa. I didn't buy it. I looked at a lot of the other computers in the list. I didn't buy them. Apple has not EVER sold me a computer. Funny. IBM has not EVER sold me a computer.
I have been running clones since 1986.
I'll predict that Microsoft's days are numbered as well. I think the number might be large however given their cash reserves. However I am hearing people tell me they are sick and tired of the shoddy windows code and the problem with malware. I think a lot of this problem stems from the X86 days and windows 3.11
The way I see it... the general population in many ways is like a school of fish. They tend to clump together for safety reasons. However, few have much in the way of any enduring investment and just like a school of fish they can all change direction rather quickly. If/when this happens then we may see the fortunes of a company like Microsoft turn sour about as fast as we saw the fortunes of GM and Chrysler turn sour.
If this happens then people will not go back. These paths tend to be traveled but once.
Parent
Sony VAIO desktop problem... (Score:5, Interesting)
The Amiga (Score:4, Interesting)
It amazes me how advanced this system* was for it's time and that it didn't catch on better than it did. The graphics and sound (just for starters) was many years ahead of it's time; x86 was still in EGA and speaker beeps at the time.
[*] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#Graphics [wikipedia.org]
Apple Lisa (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anybody know what the "unique document management metaphor that has yet to be replicated in a mainstream OS" is, and why it might have set a new standard in computing? It sounds terribly intriguing. Might this be something that could/should be added to Linux?
Re:Apple Lisa (Score:5, Informative)
As mentioned by others, document-centric computing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Lisa#Historical_importance [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xerox_Star#User_interface [wikipedia.org]
People keep having stabs at it, and to give MS their due they did try pretty hard with Win95 and OLE/COM, and got rid of MDI [wikipedia.org] in later versions of Office .. but some it never seems to have been perfected on mass-market machines. The tab-view that we have in browsers now seems to be actively moving away from it (this is your application .. with your documents as child objects to it .. - though at least Chrome has the decency to put the tabs at the top of window.)
It'll probably get leap-frogged as an idea by all this Web2.0 stuff and in-browser apps (which again is a regression: you still have to think about which SoaS-providing site you have to go to get a particular job done.)
Parent
deja vue all over again in smart phones (Score:4, Insightful)
PCjr (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest single problem with the PCjr was that it was late. In 1984 it was supposed to be on the shelf in the fall - October is the usual month when things are supposed to be shipped so they are stocked and on the shelf in November.
Didn't happen. Macy's had received $50,000 to hold shelf space for the PCjr and they left them empty.
The PCjr came out in February. A little late for Christmas. Everyone had created products for Christmas 84 specifically for the PCjr, but there wasn't anything to run them on. January 1985 CES was pretty dead - lots of PCJr games that nobody cared about. Parker Brothers closed down their electronic games division, as did lots of other companies right about then. It was a year or so later that the Nintendo finally started making inroads into the home game market but between the PCjr and Nintendo things were very, very dead.
You can say all you want about a poor design of the keyboard and limitations of the hardware. But it is even more difficult to use when it doesn't exist and cannot be purchased. Not having it in time killed it, not any stupid design decisions.
A few of my favourite things - from the workshop (Score:5, Interesting)
I could go on...!
This is a good opportunity for a new myth (Score:5, Funny)
Well sonny, I remember it was back in the '80s. There were these guys who loved their Apple IIIs so much that, despite its faults, they kept them running for years beyond their useful lifetimes. They did this by filling their offices with industrial-strength fans pointed at those Apple IIIs. Ever since then, we've called people who continue to support obviously flawed products "fanboys"
Real mistakes (Score:5, Informative)
Those are mistakes an end user would see. Here are some deeper mistakes from an engineerings standpoint.
Re:Keyboard layout... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing irks me more than having to go hunting for oft-used keys such as end, delete, etc. on every different laptop. I've seen them below shift, above enter, buried as an Fn-key... *continues on for another few minutes*.
Parent
Re:Keyboard layout... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:General trend (Score:5, Insightful)
And even though its not classic, I think the "underpowered" Vista machines deserve at least a mention.
Can we stop with the knee-jerk microsoft bashing? The article is literally titled "Fifteen _Classic_ PC Design Mistake." There's nothing in the article that would make a vista reference even relevent. Posting as AC to avoid karma whoring like the parent.
Parent
Not really (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, way I see it, not really. At _least_ half the mistakes there are about cutting corners (e.g., the crappy cheap keyboards, an ultra-expensive computer shoved out the door with an unreliable floppy drive, etc), and most of the rest are about blatantly trying to nickel-and-dime the users (e.g., the lack of a format command so they have to buy their floppies from you only, or all the connectors on the PC Jr being incompatible with the standard PC ones, etc.)
Unfortunately both types of failures are standard stapples of capitalism, so don't expect them to go away any time soon. Even though those particular 15 manifestations of them might not happen again, we're just seeing new and innovative ways to do the same two things. E.g., when EA cuts costs on testing their new game, _and_ launches a new game with over half the content sold separately (check out The Sims 3: from day 1 there was more virtual furniture for sale for real money on their site than included with the game)... I'm sure you can see the same two things at work.
E.g., for hardware, when as you correctly mention a system that's waay underpowered for Vista is sold as Vista ready, you have the first failure mode in action: they wanted to sell a system as Vista ready, without actually including the expensive hardware needed to actually be ready. It's just cutting corners.
E.g., nickel-and-diming... well, let's just say HP's whole printer ink business is based on that. It recently even reached such absurdity as including chips to make the ink or toner cartridge artifficially "expire" after a while, even if there's actually plenty of ink left inside. For some users that already was the straw that broke the camel's back, but I expect some bright MBA to try something even more ham-fisted soon.
Parent
Re:biggest mistake: PC = 8088 not M68000!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
There were other reasons for IBM to go with the 8086-family chipsets:
1) the 8086/8088's bus could easily drive the 8080-family support chips such as the 8251, 8255, 8259 etc. to build a complete system. The MC68k family support chips were even later than the release of the CPU itself (in some cases like the MMU several years late) and the MC68k bus could not be easily interfaced with the Intel family chips which were cheap and in plentiful supply.
2) the 8086 family's internal data registers and addressing modes were designed to simplify conversion of existing 8080 code to run on the new 16-bit CPUs. The 68k, although a superior CPU in all respects to the 8086 family, had no tools available to make code conversion from the 6800 or other sibling CPU family (6809, 6502 etc.) simple -- all 68k code had to be written from scratch.
3) the 68k was an expensive chip, not suprising as it was complex and required a large die, necessitating a 0.6" wide 68-pin DIL ceramic package. Motorola's target market for the chip was $10,000 workstations, not "toy" desktop computers only costing $2,000. By comparison the 8088 was cheap as chips.
Parent