Elegant Architecture or Speed?

[rpiguy9907]

Most users wouldn't know the difference if the ibm pc had a motorola cpu inside. Would it have been slow? Things sure could have been different for these companies. Would microsoft have survived without ibm? An ibm pc powered by a 32-bit 68k cpu running digital research operating systems sounds okay.

 

The ibm pc used open standard architecture to keep costs down and get to market quickly. Otherwise it wouldn't compete with apple/commodore/tandy/atari. The ibm pc bios was protected by copyright. It had to be reverse engineered and rewritten for clones to happen. Original ibm clones were not 100% software compatible without that bios. Arm computers running windows are still not compatible with windows software. Interesting about azure; they do have to provide the software their customers are asking for afterall.

 

 

I agree completely that an end-user would have not known the difference, and the 68K wasn't very slower, I was not implying that a great PC could not have been built around 68K, only saying that the all of the hype around the 68K and its elegant architecture didn't really translate into a speed advantage for the user and it would have definitely been several times faster than an 8088 PC with an 8-bit bus.