Re: The IBM PC's slavish devotion to the Apple II

[hawk@slytherin.ds.psu.edu (Dr. Richard E. Hawkins)]

In article <20030612145914.17584.00000440@mb-m10.aol.com>,
Michael J. Mahon <mjmahon@aol.com> wrote:
>Great Hierophant wrote:

>I have a small quibble with this.
>
>Since the size of a single segment on an 8088 is equal in size to
>the entire address space of the 6502, how can Apple II programmers
>look down their noses at 8088 programmers?  

I had a bigger quibble with calling the 6502 an 8/16, and then using the
same lable for the 8088.  It's been over 20 years since I've looked at a
6502 seriously, but I don't recall *anything* other than a couple of
memory adresses that's 16 about it.  Three 8 bit registers (A, X, and
Y), an 8 bit stack pointer, and a 16 bit adress register, isn't it?

Meanwhile, the 8088 was a full 16 with an 8 bit bus (and calling it
16/32 was kind of silly).

8/16 made sense for the 6809, and 16/32 for the 68000 and 68010,
though--the original 68000 specs actually showed the future expansion of
registers (in dotted lines, iirc), though they did have to back off on
one of the 68010 instructions in the 68020 and later.

hawk
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