[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Charles Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>
>Date: 2007/06/04 Mon PM 05:51:23 CDT
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Microsoft Surface...

>Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
>> Before the IBM PC, MS supported 6502, 8080, Z80, and numerous other CPUs, 
>> when the IBM PC took over the market, MS dropped the other chips.
>
>What else did they do outside of Zilog/Intel?
>
>I was a 6502 and Motorola guy, and I saw almost nothing from Microsoft, but
>tons of Microsoft tools for Zilog and Intel machines.
>
>About all I remember for the other CPUs was versions of Microsoft BASIC.
>
>What else did they produce for non Intel and Zilog systems?  I collect old
>software and would like to snag it for my collection.
>

Well, are we including Mac products? If so, isn't that where Word, Excel and various other "PC" applications got their start?

At the time they supported the 6502, 8080, and other processors they supported them as needed by the PC industry at the time, which was mainly for BASIC, either in ROM or manually loaded...

>Someone told me they made a 6502 C compiler, but I've never been able to find
>anything like that.

That doesn't sound familiar, but they did offer/design/build/sell a Z80 card for the Apple ][,and I think they even offered CP/M under the MS brand for a while...

>> MS does not design or build PCs, quite the contrary, most PC builders design 
>> their PCs to work with MS operating systems... 
>
>PC builders have to do that because MS will not change the HAL in Windows,
>even though originally that was one of their bragging points.

PC builders can build whatever they want, unfortunately what they want to build (as far as I can tell) are Wintel boxes running Vista...

One of the first rules in computing was to pick the software you wanted to run, then get the machine it runs on - when that phrase rose in prominence it was becuase there were so many different platforms to choose from (CP/M, TRS-80, Apple, Commodore, Amiga, and others).

>The PC has not needed any of the legacy hardware support for ten years now,
>and Microsoft is the only reason it is still there.

The iPaq desktop tried (and failed) to convince everyone they didn't need parallel or serial ports on their computers (USB 1.1 would suffice!), it failed to convince everyone and failedin the market...[0]

Lionel

[0] http://developer.novell.com/yes/63093.htm (config of Legacy Free desktop from 2001) Also see:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/UCR/SupportManual/TPM_164531-001_ch1/TPM_164531-001_ch1.pdf