Alternate Timeline

[EugeneNine]

Originally Posted by babsimov

Lew Eggebrecht explain that at the begining IBM want to use 68000 instead of 8086.

http://www.amigahistory.plus.com/leweggebrecht.html

Originally Posted by matthey

It is amazing that the IBM PC started with a weak 8 bit 8088 introduced the same year (1979) as the 68000. The biggest advantages the IBM PC had was that it was very open (because the U.S. DOJ was breathing down IBM's neck?) and had a company behind it with a good reputation for (business) computers. Somehow the turd improved and reached a critical mass which allowed it to dominate the market and even put superior technologies out of business with economies of scale (mainly Intel with the CPU). Most U.S. consumers chose a cheap open turd which turned into a black hole which sucked the life out of computing as the world entered the dark ages of computing.

The Lew Eggebrecht article gets it partly. The somewhat backward compatibility with 8080, z80, etc was a big plus for the 8088/8086. There were already many business machines with 8080's, z80's, etc running CP/M and compilers that could be quickly be patched to cross compile for 8088 and DOS instead of CP/M. A lot of CP/M software was ported to dos in the early days so as companies replaced older systems or expanded they couple replace with or add IBM PC's along with their existing CP/M systems and have compatibility.

I think Motorola lost the race due to the 6502, when the moto engineers left and made the 6502 and it under cut the 6800 line they started loosing business right there.

The third plus of the 8088 was the .gov contracts requiring a second source. It was a simple requirement of most .gov and .mil contracts that every component shave a secondary source and therefore Intel's licensing of the 8080/8088/8086/x86 architecture to AMD, yet it came back later to bite them in the 386/486 days but in the early days Intel and IBM were the only vendor which could meet the requirement.

The 6800 and 6500 were only available from one company each (moto and mos) though MOS did license some of the 6500's later on. Moto then broke software compatibility going from the 6800 to the 68k so the few business systems on 6800 couldn't simply migrate to the 68k. But I again think it was too late already anyway as the winner was already decided due to the first two factors.

Most don't remember before the IBM PC, the s100 bus. There was already an established open industry standard way before then and eventually the OS on those systems standardized on CP/M and the 8080's and licensees and clones so it was simple for IBM to continue the momentum. There were some 6800 based S100 systems but as the 6500 line eroded the 6800's sales no standard OS emerged.

These reasons I are why the war was already won even before the IBM PC. If you want to go back in time and change things you need to go earlier than the 68k. Start by keeping the 6800 engineers from leaving moto and starting MOStek.

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by Gorf

I mentioned Taligent/CommonPoint in this thread already a few pages back.

I think there is mostly IBM to blame, but it might have been already to late for that since MS had all PC manufacturers on board already.
IBM paid/evaluated it's programmers by "lines of code" instead of implemented features. So bloat was rewarded! This made every approach memory and CPU hungry and all IBM software and operating systems suffered from this.

ah sorry, I did not read every post in thread, there is lot of text
my mistake!

[idrougge]

The 6502 could be second-sourced from Rockwell, the 6800 from Hitachi and AMI.

The 68000 was available from Hitachi, SGS-Thomson, Signetics and others.

Note that the 8086 was hardly used by any manufacturer of computers, games or instruments outside of IBM.

[Gorf]

Back in 94/95 "Vobis", the best selling PC vendor in Germany back then, bundled it's PCs with OS/2, because Win95 was late and OS/2 was clearly better than Win3.11.
They wanted to continue to offer a choice to the costumers after Win95 came out, what OS they prefer.

So the MS-empire stroke back: no one talked anymore to Vobis, they refused to certify the hardware as Windows compatible, they canceled the OEM version.
Vobis was not "allowed" to get a OEM license for the same line of hardware, as long as they offer OS/2 for this line.
A different second line of hardware would have been too expensive of course and not offering Windows at all would have been suicide.

So they stopped bundling OS/2 after a few month.
A lawsuit would have lasted years, so the only thing Vobis could do was releasing angry press releases...

[drHirudo]

Originally Posted by EugeneNine

These reasons I are why the war was already won even before the IBM PC. If you want to go back in time and change things you need to go earlier than the 68k. Start by keeping the 6800 engineers from leaving moto and starting MOStek.

That's why in my thread I pointed what was not right with the Amiga from day one. When the Lorraine was developed mainly back in 1983, they were changing the world, by setting new standards, but the world didn't want to accept the new standards, especially the enterprise world, where adopting new standards is very slow, but yet not impossible, i.e the Amiga didn't choose the 8088/8086 processors, because they were weak at the time, even if compatible with older processors. The 68000 was magnitudes better for anything, but it was not backward compatible with previous generations of CPUs (not that were that many, but the CP/M standard was already there, hence the 68K CP/M).

[EugeneNine]

Originally Posted by idrougge

The 6502 could be second-sourced from Rockwell, the 6800 from Hitachi and AMI.

The 68000 was available from Hitachi, SGS-Thomson, Signetics and others.

Note that the 8086 was hardly used by any manufacturer of computers, games or instruments outside of IBM.

look at the timeline though, when IBM chose the 8088 it wasn't. They learned from their mistake.

[EugeneNine]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Back in 94/95 "Vobis", the best selling PC vendor in Germany bach than, bundled it's PCs with OS/2, because Win95 was late and OS/2 was clearly better than Win3.11.
They wanted to continue to offer a choice to the costumers after Win95 came out, what OS they prefer.

So the MS-Impire stoke back: no one talked anymore to Vobis, they refused to certify the hardware as Windows compatible, they canceled the OEM version.
Vobis was not "allowed" to get a OEM license for the same line of hardware, as long as they offer OS/2 for this line.
A different second line of hardware would have been too expensive of course and not offering Windows at all would have been suicide.

So they stopped bundling OS/2 after a few month.
A lawsuit would have lasted years, so the only thing Vobis could do was releasing angry press releases...

Eventually the lawsuit did happen, but it was the us .gov against MS. by then it was too late and the results, while technically legal, were not much different. OEM's using windows exclusively got a nice discount so that those not pushing windows 100% were priced out of the market.

[EugeneNine]

Originally Posted by drHirudo

That's why in my thread I pointed what was not right with the Amiga from day one. When the Lorraine was developed mainly back in 1983, they were changing the world, by setting new standards, but the world didn't want to accept the new standards, especially the enterprise world, where adopting new standards is very slow, but yet not impossible, i.e the Amiga didn't choose the 8088/8086 processors, because they were weak at the time, even if compatible with older processors. The 68000 was magnitudes better for anything, but it was not backward compatible with previous generations of CPUs (not that were that many, but the CP/M standard was already there, hence the 68K CP/M).

Well established standards are hard to change, look at how long its taking to go from IPv4 to IPv6.

Yes they ported CP/M to the 68k but that was long after 8080 was the established 'standard' for CP/M. The OS might be fine but there was no third party CP/M 68k applications. Repeat history with Windows NT for Aplha, the OS ran and SQL server but practically no third party applications so it was a dud.

[idrougge]

Originally Posted by EugeneNine

look at the timeline though, when IBM chose the 8088 it wasn't. They learned from their mistake.

When IBM chose the 8088, there were no second sources for that either. Intel only went into partnership with AMD because they had a lucrative IBM contract. Are you saying that Motorola wouldn't have done the same?

[EugeneNine]

Originally Posted by idrougge

When IBM chose the 8088, there were no second sources for that either. Intel only went into partnership with AMD because they had a lucrative IBM contract. Are you saying that Motorola wouldn't have done the same?

Intel already had the partnership for the 8080, 8085, etc. But that wasn't the only reason the ability to migrate existing 8080 CP/M software was a big part of it too.

[idrougge]

Motorola already knew what second-sourcing was, and there was no second source for the 8088 until IBM asked for it. Second sourcing was a subject when IBM evaluated the TI 9900, but the 68000 was never even a contender. IBM had made their choice a bit too early to consider the 68000, CP/M compatibility notwithstanding.

[EugeneNine]

Thats why I was saying at the time the 6800 was mainly the comparison at the time, but the 6800 really didn't take off in the business world, it was more popular in the industrial sector later becoming popular as the 68HC11, etc. The 6502 stole all the game market. When the 68k did come along it broke compatibility but was kind of too late anyway.

[matthey]

Originally Posted by idrougge

Motorola already knew what second-sourcing was, and there was no second source for the 8088 until IBM asked for it. Second sourcing was a subject when IBM evaluated the TI 9900, but the 68000 was never even a contender. IBM had made their choice a bit too early to consider the 68000, CP/M compatibility notwithstanding.

The 68000 was available in September 1979 and the IBM PC in August 1981. From what I have read, the IBM PC project was a fast track project completed in about 12 months (project start would have been about August 1980 so 68000 would have been out for about 5 months). IBM usually created/used their own OS and CPU but outsourced the CPU to Intel and the OS to MS to save time. Outsourcing the OS and CPU as well as the choice to be way more open with the hardware and software were polar opposites from normal IBM product development and marketing (which proved fateful). Perhaps you mean the 68000 was not even considered for other reasons than availability?

[idrougge]

I recently read an article by a TI employee about IBM coming to visit to look at their 9900 CPU, which could be regarded as a contender to the 8086 (it wasn't, but at least it was 16 bits). It also mentions the 68000 being disregarded because it was not yet available in larger quantities.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/h...microprocessor

[EugeneNine]

Yes, the 68k was created in time but not available in quantities. Intel was ahead there due to the already second/third/etc sourcing of the 8080, 8085, etc. CP/M was already the business OS winner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/M so when IBM choose the 8088 it was easier to port over existing 8080 software. There are some cp/m compatibility functions in DOS to make that easier as well. CP/M got ported to the 68k but it was after the IBM PC's release as an effort to catch up.
Moto would have had to get cp/m up on the 68k from the start but even then it still might not have had any business applications as it would need to sell enough to make it worth porting from 8080 to 68k. The 68k had a big footprint, both in the cpu itssef but support and ram, it didn't fit well on the standard s100 bus systems at the time either. Mototola played a big part in the VME bus later which was successful but again too late.
Thats why I think the was really was one before the PC with CP/M, the PC was designed as the next incremental step from CP/M, not really as big leap in technology.

[idrougge]

While I agree that CP/M compatibility was a factor for IBM (MS-DOS was closely based on CP/M conventions), it doesn't seem to have been a big factor for the market. IBM could have released a pizza box with a pile of feces in it and still sold a sizable number of units with good software support, as indicated by the small number of important PC applications that came from CP/M. The CP/M market was so fragmented that CP/M compatibility in itself was no guarantee of a good software base, and the entire computer market was so small by 1981 that the total software base could be replaced in two years' time and with better features to boot. It was not like in the 90s, when there was already so much legacy software that even the purveyors of legacy systems were held captive by backwards compatibility with themselves – as in the case of Microsoft and IBM.

[babsimov]

I found a document that compared the different RISC processors of the 90s.

At the end of this document is a comparative table of performances.

Sorry it's in French





It can be seen that PA-RISC was, in fact, the most powerful processor of the time. In fact he obtains a score in floating calculation equivalent to that of the DEC Alpha (deemed the most powerful) and barely inferior in full to that of the Alpha.

But, you also have to see how often it gets these very good results. It is at 180 mhz there or to obtain equivalent performances a Dec Alpha has to turn to 500 mhz !!!

It can also be seen that in this table the PA-RISC is the one that is clocked at the lowest frequency and that it surpasses all its competitors yet having a higher frequency.
The PowerPC is well ahead, especially floating. The PentiumPRO (thus the X86) is also largely exceeded while it runs at 200 mhz against 180 mhz for PA-RISC. Let's talk about the MIPS (the one of the PS1), it gets very close results ... but turning to almost 100 mhz above the PA-RISC. So if Commodore had released, as expected, a machine based on PA-RISC at 50 mhz, this machine would have had pure performance far above the MIPS at 33 mhz of a playstation.

That is why it confirms me in my opinion that finally the choice of PA-RISC by the engineers of Commodore was most judicious and that it could have re-launched advantageously the Amiga.

For information, PA-RISC ended his career in 2005 at 1.1 ghz.

[alewis]

An alternate timeline?

Simples. Commodore management do three things differently:

1. They support developers; ensure there is accurate system documentation, and that it is available to all developers. Devkits, including hardware, are available.

2. They create and sustain working partnerships with the dealer channel, not undercutting dealers with new agreements with retailers. They work at hard at enduring hardware is available to buy, and faulty hardware is returned, replaced, repaired promptly.

3. They sign licensing agreements with Lotus, Ashton-Tate, Micro-prose, and WordPerfect Corp, ensuring that Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, WordStar, and Word Perfect are ALL available for the Amiga as of July 1985, and all are file-format compatible with their PC versions. CrossDos capability is inbuilt into Workbench 1.1

Thus the conditions for the success of the Amiga are created. Businesses flock to adopt the new machine, given it runs the same software as their existing PCs, their is no loss of data, and the new machine is not just more powerful, but more versatile; unlike the PC, it can run a word processor, spreadsheet, and database at once with seamless easy switching g between the multiple programs.

Amiga becomes the dominant business PC. Seeing which way the wind is blowing, PAgemaker and Quark are quickly ported, and Apple becomes a footnote in history. IBM leave the PC market.

Fly in ointment? Unless Commodore either invest very heavily in manufacturing, or licence the hardware, C= are unable to meet sales demand and business adopt the lesser capable but available x86 platform.

its not about the hardware, it's the software, and the intangible very necessary eco-systems of support and sales channels,

[babsimov]

@alewsis

I agree with the 3 points. Commodore should have pushed the Amiga further into the office market and would not have enter the IBM PC market and focus solely on the success of Amiga.