Re: ANN: Retiring from A2 world - Good Bye All!

[pausch@saaf.se (Paul Schlyter)]

In article <3d0c81df_4@news3.prserv.net>,
Tom Zuchowski <tzuchow@attglobal.net> wrote:
 
> You got me! <g> That =was= a rather stupid thing for me to have said.
> Still, I think that the A/// could have been a real contender if Apple
> had not been so stupid with the chip sockets, and an A///+ with 65816
> might have carried on the legacy.
 
Playing "what if" games may be fun but is often pointless.
 
For instance IBM originally considered putting a 68000 into the PC
instead of an 8088, and I think most people in this forum would agree
that the PC would have been a nicer computer if they actually had
done so.....  The reason they switched to the 8088 was that it
enabled them to make a chaper motherboard, since the 8088 has an
8-bit external data bus.  Now, suppose Motorola had released their
68008 a little earlier.....
 
Anyway, compared to both the x86 and the 68K CPU families, the 65K
(i.e. the 65802/816/832) CPU family had one serious drawback: it had
no floating-point co-processor, neither built-in nor as a separate
chip.  But what if there had been a floating-piont coprocessor to
the 65816/832.... :-)
 
> As for the S100 machine being the business standard, I suppose you are
> right, but every computerized store I remember seeing around here had an
> Apple II+ on the counter. (Then again, an S100 wouldn't have been on the
> counter, would it? I may be way off base.) Also, I am not aware of an S100
> equivalent of VisiCalc.
 
Multiplan (a VisiCalc look-alike) ran on CP/M-80.  And early versions
of Borland's Turbo Pascal (originally released for CP/M-80) included
Micro-Calc, a small VisiCalc look-alike, with full Turbo Pascal source
code!
 
And businesses mostly do other things than play with VisiCalc
lookalikes on their computers.....  Visicalc look-alikes are fine for
exploratory computational tasks which aren't too complex or too data
intensive.  You don't run the payrolls for a large company on
Visicalc, for instance!!!!
 
.........................
 
> I gave some more thought to this, and it occurs to me that apart from
> anything else, the Apple II was probably doomed because of the 6502
> architecture. Now that you mention it, I do remember a lot of talk in
> various magazines about the superiority of the 16-bit architecture for the
> very reason you cited (which I deleted from the quote.)
 
The 8-bit CPU's generally had a 16-bit address space (with a few
exceptions; the early 8008 for instance only had a 12-bit address
space), and 16 bits can address 64K.  Now, the 16-bit CPU's generally
had an address space larger than 16 bits.  The Motorola 68000 had a
24-bit address space, capable of addressing 16 MBytes.  And the Intel
8086/8088 had a 20-bit address space, capable of addressing 1 MByte,
which was extended to a 24-bit address space on the 286 (but only in
protected mode, which initially rarely was used).
 
-- 
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