Comment alternate universe (Score 1) 98
Oh yes it did. I'm guessing you're just too young to remember. Thanks to massive os/2 tv campaigns, "normal" people suddenly wanted a computer, not just a console to play games on
I'm certainly not "too young to remember". I wish.
It was a different world then. There wasn't an internet to immediately find out that some marketing term was full of shit. If five percent of the population at the time could distinguish OS/2 from PS/2 I'd be shocked. The one thing people knew for certain is that IBM never went hungry. IBM was attempting to run the entire information technology industry as a centrally planned economy, with some success. When the PC division was finally cut loose from the rest of the Blue Machine, it was mainly to free it from the IBM culture of seven layers of internal review on every decision about capability, volume, or price.
The only reason IBM entered the PC business in the first place was to drain away the nimbleness of young legs. If IBM had allowed the PC industry to cannibalize the mid-range sooner and more aggressively, all their employees clinging to incentive clauses in their mid-range operations would have started to circulate their resumes, both within IBM and without. As my brother never ceases to repeat: the first rats off a sinking ship are the best swimmers. Loss of talent off the top would have been horrendous in some of their existing cash-cow business lines. Quarterly earnings reports would have ceased to glow and executives would spending more quality time with family.
Businesses really do paint themselves into a corner with their internal incentive structures. Tearing up all those employment contracts is disruptive. Clinging to the past is dangerous. Operating a company with different rules in different divisions can quickly gut your workforce at the high end, as the best swimmers stampede to opportunity unleashed. It's extraordinarily rare to gut the cash cow, no matter how rabid the skinny upstart across the street.
What IBM underestimated was the acceleration term: how much more quickly a person armed with a crappy PC was able to figure out they had been saddled with an over-built and over-priced tank capriciously constrained to lumber along with an insufficient engine for a decade or more.
Intel 80286 had 134,000 transistors. Cortex M0 can be implemented in 12K gates. Based on logic functions which shows 12 transistors for a general purpose flip flop these designs are at about the same level of complexity. 80286 runs 2.66 MIPS at 12.5 MHz. The M0 runs 0.9 MIPS/MHz (wider MIPS to boot). Now it might be the case that exploiting the Cortex instruction set back in the eighties was a beyond the compiler technology of the day, but somehow I have my doubts that IBM was incapable of crossing that bridge had they chosen to do so.
I'd be very curious to see someone figure out how well a Cortex M0 could have been implemented in the 80286 process technology. Three to one margin? It's certainly possible on the surface numbers. The downside of the Cortex is increasing memory pressure with wider native memory cycles and a more severe performance trade-off when byte-packing or bit-packing every important data structure. The wider off-chip memory path is a significant PCB fabrication cost.
As I correct one myopic IBM decision after another I wind up in an alternate universe where AT&T sues IBM instead of suing BSD/Cortex. Those of us who lived through this era spent a lot of time day-dreaming about alternate universes.