[geeks] Microsoft Surface...

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: William Kirkland <bill.kirkland at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/06/04 Mon PM 02:52:26 CDT
>To: geeks at sunhelp.org
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Microsoft Surface...

>Date: Mon, 4 Jun 2007 11:36:07 -0500
>From: Doug McLaren <dougmc at frenzied.us>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Microsoft Surface...
<snip>

> > I guess Microsoft chose the 8088 (x86) for their PC over the  
>obviously
> > superior 680x0 as well?  The fools!
>
>Yes to both. [ no sarcasm ] the Motorola family of processors were at  
>least 6 months ahead of the intel at the time. Though even with a  
>slower clock cycle on the Motorola line, more real computations could  
>be performed (due partly to the much larger addressing modes of the  
>processor, and higher quantity of registers).

CRIPES - IBM choose the 8088 for it's first PC, and based it in large measure 
on a reference design from Intel at the time. IIRC, it was choosen for price 
and 8080-compatibility (as wella s other reasons I'm sure). Microsoft will 
support chips that generate sufficient market penetration to warrant their 
interest, or appear to be poised to do that (WinNT on Alpha, PowerPC, etc.).

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.

MS does not design or build PCs, quite the contrary, most PC builders design 
their PCs to work with MS operating systems... Can I blame/thank MS for the 
dwindling number of PCI sockets on today's PCs too?

Lionel