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It depends on your perspective. From a mainframe/minicomputer standpoint it was pretty good. From the microcomputer perspective it was nuts. Unfortunately fo
by jandrese 4y ago
It depends on your perspective. From a mainframe/minicomputer standpoint it was pretty good. From the microcomputer perspective it was nuts. Unfortunately for Intel they've always been closely associated with microcomputers so that is the standard by which they were judged.
- twoodfin 4y agoAt the time it wasn’t at all clear that microcomputers and their architecture would graduate from being toys for hobbyists to ruling the computing world. It was assumed in many circles (including Intel, apparently) that minis and mainframes—really, more “modular” less “integrated” architectures—would own the enterprise. (The dependence on Ada makes a lot more sense in this context: Your mainframe vendor telling you what language you could use wasn’t odd at all in that space.) DEC also essentially fell victim to this misapprehension, and unlike Intel didn’t have a Plan B.