It seems that every version of MS-DOS from v2.0 onward was actually developed by Compaq. I had no idea.
> That relationship had been established in late 1982. Back then, Gates had contacted Canion and asked, with some concern, if Compaq was trying to get into the operating system business. Surprised, Canion denied it. Gates told him that Microsoft was hearing worrying reports from the dealer network. People were buying copies of Compaq DOS, rather than Microsoft DOS, without buying a Compaq PC.
> Both men knew why: Microsoft DOS had never been a true copy of PC DOS, as Gates had admitted to Canion during the development of Compaq’s first machine. The differences had only increased over time, as Microsoft’s deal with IBM prohibited the same developers working on both versions. Compaq had made its own version of DOS since the beginning. With its singular focus on 100 percent compatibility, the result was a product that was more compatible with PC DOS than Microsoft’s own product.
> Word was spreading among computer buyers that Compaq DOS was better. Even people who owned other PC clones were choosing to buy that instead of Microsoft’s own public version. This could have created friction between Compaq and Microsoft. Instead, Canion did something extraordinary. Compaq withdrew Compaq DOS from sale unless it was specifically bundled with a Compaq computer. He then licensed Compaq DOS back to Microsoft.
> From Gates’s perspective, this was an incredible deal. He was able to halt all internal development on Microsoft DOS, saving time and money. From this point onward, every version of Microsoft DOS he sold was, in fact, Compaq DOS, with the digital equivalent of its serial numbers filed off. All Canion asked in return was that Microsoft never release the very latest version of DOS that Compaq provided it until after a few months’ delay. This was to make sure that Compaq always had a slight advantage in compatibility over its rivals.
> Canion even agreed to Gates’s request that they keep the entire arrangement secret, to avoid souring Microsoft’s relationships with the other clone companies. It would remain secret for almost 40 years.
I wonder if this is slightly mangled over the years?
MS-DOS wasn’t a specific IBM PC OS, it was designed to be generic 8086 OS. It was up to the OEM to adapt the machine specific code (mostly in IO.SYS / IBMBIO.COM) to their system. IBM owned IBMBIO.COM, and some of the utilities like MODE and FDISK, and early on Microsoft didn’t have its own implementations to offer for people building generic PC clones. You had to write your own, and hope they were compatible. Microsoft did eventually offer a generic MS DOS with an IBM PC type IO.SYS and reimplementation of the utilities, so perhaps those are descended from Compaq’s versions?
This is largely untrue. MS-DOS and PC DOS were both built out of the same codebase for most of the time MS-DOS was on the market. They didn't diverge until some point after DOS 5 (1991). If you look at the MS-DOS source code, you'll see an IBMVER define that controls whether to build IBM PC DOS or generic MS-DOS. The option was there in the first place because Microsoft initially sold MS-DOS to OEMs as a generic 8086 operating system. In the early 80s there were a bunch of computers that ran MS-DOS, but weren't PC compatible. These largely died out as time went on. DOS was barely an operating system, so there were a lot of programs that bypassed it and accessed the hardware directly. None of those programs worked on non-PC clone MS-DOS computers, so most consumers chose PC clones for the far greater software library. What is true is that unlike most early 80s OEMs, Compaq built their version of MS-DOS with IBMVER set, so Compaq DOS was closer to PC DOS than many other early DOSs.
As time went on and Microsoft started selling more and more copies of MS-DOS to manufacturers making PC clones, MS-DOS and PC DOS grew closer together, not further apart. MS-DOS 3.2 (1986) was the first version that Microsoft made available in a packaged form to OEMs that were shipping PC clones (it was still available as source code to OEMs who wanted more customization). For previous versions, OEMs were required to write their own versions of several hardware specific utilities (such as FDISK.COM and MODE.COM) that were originally written by IBM. MS-DOS 3.2 contained Microsoft-written clones of these utilities. MS-DOS 3.3 (1987) was written entirely by IBM (not Compaq!), as most of the key members of the MS-DOS team were busy working on OS/2. Because it came out after the Microsoft-IBM joint development agreement, Microsoft gained the rights to the IBM-written utilities and the packaged versions of MS-DOS 3.3 and all later versions shipped with the same utilities as their PC DOS counterparts.
The closest thing to the claims this article makes is that Compaq did in fact maintain their source code license to MS-DOS and made enhancements to their version. The most notable example of this is that Compaq DOS 3.31 introduced a modified version of FAT16 that supported partitions larger than 32MB. I assume Compaq licensed this functionality back to Microsoft, as there's versions of DOS 3.31 branded for other OEMs, and support for Compaq's modified FAT16 (known as FAT16B) was included in MS-DOS 4.0.
> It seems that every version of MS-DOS from v2.0 onward was actually developed by Compaq. I had no idea.
The article is wrong about when this occurred—Compaq DOS wouldn't have been in stores in 1982; 1983 is likely the correct year—but regardless, this is an astounding revelation.
These other versions of MS-DOS were licensed by PC clone OEMs and bundled with the PC clones. Microsoft didn't sell MS-DOS directly to consumers until later.
This is too funny. I got down voted to hell for talking about how Gates never really made anything and was a lucky conman who managed to make his cons a reality by the skin of his teeth, and here we have further proof of just that.
I messed up the family PC and decided to reinstall windows on its 80mb drive that had been repartitioned to 100mb thanks to dos 6.22 and doublespace.
However, I did not have dos 6.22 install disks, I had dos 5.0 install disks and then 6.22 upgrades, and the 5.0 disks could not see the hard drive partition that doublespace had taken over, so it saw our 80mb hard drive as a 1-ish mb hard drive that was too small to install to.
Format couldn't see it, and fdisk couldn't either, so I could not start over from scratch no matter what I did.
Queue me panicking.
My mom was at work overnight. I had until she got back to fix it or I was dead meat.
I had no money, I was a child. I had no one and nothing to turn to other than the user manuals that came with the operating systems
I knew how to make a bootable floppy disk, and using that knowledge and a nat 20 inspiration roll I made a bootable dos 6.22 floppy disk that had the doublespace system on it, booted the home pc with that, used the doublespace software to revert the drive, and then was able to reinstall dos 5, upgrade to 6.22, install windows 3.1 and all of my moms software to finish up about 15 minutes before she arrived home in the morning.
The first thing my mom did when she got home was boot up the family PC. She was a little peeved that her solitaire high score got erased but everything else was fine.
Licensing Compaq DOS back to Microsoft was a mistake. It gave Microsoft’s OS incumbency. The PC industry has been suffering from that decision ever since.
Hindsight view. At the time Microsoft was the "open" little guy fighting the big evil monopolist IBM. The MS monopoly wasn't so total, and Linux servers spread everywhere. Extremely unlikely that would have happened had Microchannel dreams come true, as IBM intended to limit PCs to the low-end.
You would have relegated Dell and Gateway 2000 to second tier-PC clone maker along with all the other PC clone makers, below Compaq, since their OEM version of MS-DOS wouldn't get the Compaq tweaks necessary to be 100% IBM PC compatible (unless Microsoft or these non-Compaq OEMs duplicated Compaq's compatibility work).
I remember going to the huge Compaq Singapore factory in Yishun in 1992, which had around 1600 employees, to assess if we can take over the support of their Banyan Vines system, as a junior engineer. 7 years later, in 1999, they laid off everyone and closed the factory, which supplied 90% of Compaq's PC boards worldwide.
Compaq's CEO at the time of the Compaq downsizing and eventual acquisition, Michael Capellas, is now the advisor to the company I work for. And the man who sold the Banyan Vines solution to Compaq in the 90's is now my boss.
As an aside, I worked on fixing computers way back when. Somewhere along the line (maybe late 80s, early 90s) Compaq started using these cheap aluminum screws to hold together the computer case and hard drive mounts and motherboard to the chassis. Those cheap screws would get stripped very easily. Many a day, I would curse Compaq. But then, later, it seemed like all the manufacturers turned to cheaper and cheaper quality parts.
One story I remember reading was about the high quality and robustness of Compaq hardware. [Web search sucks these days so google and bing can't find the story]
The story goes that the floppy disk drive for Compaq computers was rated for a very high number of floppy disk insertions and ejections. More insertions/ejections than were possible unless one was doing nothing but inserting and ejecting floppy disks all the time.
So the exec selected a lower-rated floppy disk drive, saving a bunch of money.
I remember reading the quotes asking one of the founders why they left Texas Instruments and his reply was "the prospect of vast personal wealth".
My understanding is that they had pitched the IBM PC compatible machine to TI and had been rebuffed - TI had its own mostly compatible PC offering and the no one in charge was willing to admit it was a mistake.
IBM might have lost, yet thanks to the way computing has evolved, vertical integration has won in the end.
Going to a computer shop on a random shopping mall, usually only a few gamer PCs are available as composable desktops, 90% of computers on display are laptops.
Servers are mostly designed for companies with racks or hyperscalers.
Most non technical people nowadays only have a smartphone and a tablet as computers, with the integration of all 8 and 16 bit home computers PC compatible were fighting against.
Apple may be vertically integrated (depending on how you figure Foxconn and TSMC), but no other machines are.
CPU from Amd/Intel, board from someone else, ram from someone else, storage from another party, OS from yet another party.
Phones are similar, maybe Samsung uses a samsung cpu, a samsung lcd, samsung ram, and samsung storage, and a Samsung build of a Google OS. More integration than Apple. Everyone else though, is still putting parts together from many suppliers.
You completely missed the point, which laptops, phones or tablets can you still buy at a regular consumer shop, that are still as configurable as old time PCs?
Have you tried to build a laptop or a tablet yourself as we used to build PCs during the 1990s?
Yes we know about System 76, and similar attempts, sadly they aren't something I can find on MediaMarket, Vobis, FNAC, Saturn, Cool Blue, Carrefour,...
Oh sure, computers are more integrated now. But you said vertically integrated which I was addressing.
Really though, when the CPU has everything you need, other than ram and storage, why do you need to have a box you can mess with?
I still build my own computers, but computers at home are becoming endangered. One of my siblings simply doesn't have one, and the other only has a work computer. Many of my child's friends don't have a computer at home, unless it's a school chromebook or their parents work in tech.
Very interesting. I'm curious what the os2museum.com can say -- if anything -- on this. A deeply technical perspective, as in knowing the actual bit-by-bit internals, can shed much more light.
os2museum.com was just recently able to trace how one particular DOS bug (more than two BIOS harddisk drives would make earlier DOS-versions hang at boot) was handled across different companies, and how and when exactly a fix made it into actual MS-DOS.
The context there was Compaq sold some of the highest-end PC systems, they were into 386/486, servers, UNIX, SMP, rackmount, RAID, etc, "IBM wouldn't sell you this stuff". So, reading between the lines there, Compaq ran into this problem first and 'fixed-it' in a backwards compatible way.
(Compaq had a fantastic reputation which they tarred with shitty consumer PCs. HPE still sells Proliants, and I'd guess they still use 'compaq screws'.)
I only ever had a laptop from Compaq, and it was the most robust and minimalist thing, like a solemn thinkpad, which is as impossible a statement as sincere. Then they got bought and I got one from their HP days that I returned straight away.
> By March 1989, however, Hugh Barnes—now Compaq’s vice president of engineering—started to notice that Intel’s best chip people were being reassigned to other teams. Some quiet investigation revealed the cause. Sun Microsystems, one of Intel’s rivals, had announced chips based on a new design approach called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). For Intel, this presented a threat to its higher-end, large computer and mainframe markets. It was now shifting to focus on that threat instead.
> At a hotel room in Silicon Valley, in April 1989, Canion and Gates met with Andy Grove and Intel chair Gordon Moore to try to persuade them to stick with 486 development. After considerable back and forth, Intel reversed course. The new chip launched in late 1989.
Could this be the moment that forever saddled us (and Intel) with the cumbersome legacy of x86? It seems like a great cultural win for PCs in the moment, but in hindsight this decision almost feels backwards somehow.
I'd say no. We would have had the Itanium drama 10 years earlier. The i860 had some flashy features in it (integrated graphics, SIMD) but also the same Achilles' heel as Itanium of compiler-directed pipeline ordering. That made it much slower than other processors and any analyst of the time would have recommended staying on x86 for the performance and not having to change all your software. So AMD and Cyrix sell more chips and Intel has to backpedal to avoid completely losing the PC market.
It sounds like they are talking about the i860 which was launched and failed in the market. While it is possible that it might have had more success if Intel chose to abandon the x86 line with its launch, I think it is more likely that it would have accelerated AMDs move from a second-source x86 manufacturer to designing its own x86 chips.
The lesson of the article is that backwards compatibility is everything. By sticking with the 486, Intel succeeded fantastically. They even eventually succumbed to building AMD64 compatible chips.
It seems that every version of MS-DOS from v2.0 onward was actually developed by Compaq. I had no idea.
> That relationship had been established in late 1982. Back then, Gates had contacted Canion and asked, with some concern, if Compaq was trying to get into the operating system business. Surprised, Canion denied it. Gates told him that Microsoft was hearing worrying reports from the dealer network. People were buying copies of Compaq DOS, rather than Microsoft DOS, without buying a Compaq PC.
> Both men knew why: Microsoft DOS had never been a true copy of PC DOS, as Gates had admitted to Canion during the development of Compaq’s first machine. The differences had only increased over time, as Microsoft’s deal with IBM prohibited the same developers working on both versions. Compaq had made its own version of DOS since the beginning. With its singular focus on 100 percent compatibility, the result was a product that was more compatible with PC DOS than Microsoft’s own product.
> Word was spreading among computer buyers that Compaq DOS was better. Even people who owned other PC clones were choosing to buy that instead of Microsoft’s own public version. This could have created friction between Compaq and Microsoft. Instead, Canion did something extraordinary. Compaq withdrew Compaq DOS from sale unless it was specifically bundled with a Compaq computer. He then licensed Compaq DOS back to Microsoft.
> From Gates’s perspective, this was an incredible deal. He was able to halt all internal development on Microsoft DOS, saving time and money. From this point onward, every version of Microsoft DOS he sold was, in fact, Compaq DOS, with the digital equivalent of its serial numbers filed off. All Canion asked in return was that Microsoft never release the very latest version of DOS that Compaq provided it until after a few months’ delay. This was to make sure that Compaq always had a slight advantage in compatibility over its rivals.
> Canion even agreed to Gates’s request that they keep the entire arrangement secret, to avoid souring Microsoft’s relationships with the other clone companies. It would remain secret for almost 40 years.
I wonder if this is slightly mangled over the years?
MS-DOS wasn’t a specific IBM PC OS, it was designed to be generic 8086 OS. It was up to the OEM to adapt the machine specific code (mostly in IO.SYS / IBMBIO.COM) to their system. IBM owned IBMBIO.COM, and some of the utilities like MODE and FDISK, and early on Microsoft didn’t have its own implementations to offer for people building generic PC clones. You had to write your own, and hope they were compatible. Microsoft did eventually offer a generic MS DOS with an IBM PC type IO.SYS and reimplementation of the utilities, so perhaps those are descended from Compaq’s versions?
This is largely untrue. MS-DOS and PC DOS were both built out of the same codebase for most of the time MS-DOS was on the market. They didn't diverge until some point after DOS 5 (1991). If you look at the MS-DOS source code, you'll see an IBMVER define that controls whether to build IBM PC DOS or generic MS-DOS. The option was there in the first place because Microsoft initially sold MS-DOS to OEMs as a generic 8086 operating system. In the early 80s there were a bunch of computers that ran MS-DOS, but weren't PC compatible. These largely died out as time went on. DOS was barely an operating system, so there were a lot of programs that bypassed it and accessed the hardware directly. None of those programs worked on non-PC clone MS-DOS computers, so most consumers chose PC clones for the far greater software library. What is true is that unlike most early 80s OEMs, Compaq built their version of MS-DOS with IBMVER set, so Compaq DOS was closer to PC DOS than many other early DOSs.
As time went on and Microsoft started selling more and more copies of MS-DOS to manufacturers making PC clones, MS-DOS and PC DOS grew closer together, not further apart. MS-DOS 3.2 (1986) was the first version that Microsoft made available in a packaged form to OEMs that were shipping PC clones (it was still available as source code to OEMs who wanted more customization). For previous versions, OEMs were required to write their own versions of several hardware specific utilities (such as FDISK.COM and MODE.COM) that were originally written by IBM. MS-DOS 3.2 contained Microsoft-written clones of these utilities. MS-DOS 3.3 (1987) was written entirely by IBM (not Compaq!), as most of the key members of the MS-DOS team were busy working on OS/2. Because it came out after the Microsoft-IBM joint development agreement, Microsoft gained the rights to the IBM-written utilities and the packaged versions of MS-DOS 3.3 and all later versions shipped with the same utilities as their PC DOS counterparts.
The closest thing to the claims this article makes is that Compaq did in fact maintain their source code license to MS-DOS and made enhancements to their version. The most notable example of this is that Compaq DOS 3.31 introduced a modified version of FAT16 that supported partitions larger than 32MB. I assume Compaq licensed this functionality back to Microsoft, as there's versions of DOS 3.31 branded for other OEMs, and support for Compaq's modified FAT16 (known as FAT16B) was included in MS-DOS 4.0.
this is a fascinating rebuttal!
> It seems that every version of MS-DOS from v2.0 onward was actually developed by Compaq. I had no idea.
The article is wrong about when this occurred—Compaq DOS wouldn't have been in stores in 1982; 1983 is likely the correct year—but regardless, this is an astounding revelation.
These other versions of MS-DOS were licensed by PC clone OEMs and bundled with the PC clones. Microsoft didn't sell MS-DOS directly to consumers until later.
According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ms-dos, MS-DOS 3.20 was the first consumer retail version of MS-DOS (then MS-DOS 5.0 was next).
This is too funny. I got down voted to hell for talking about how Gates never really made anything and was a lucky conman who managed to make his cons a reality by the skin of his teeth, and here we have further proof of just that.
While we're wandering down memory lane, we should remember the Stacker/DoubleSpace ripoff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_law...
I owe my IT career to doublespace, lol.
I messed up the family PC and decided to reinstall windows on its 80mb drive that had been repartitioned to 100mb thanks to dos 6.22 and doublespace.
However, I did not have dos 6.22 install disks, I had dos 5.0 install disks and then 6.22 upgrades, and the 5.0 disks could not see the hard drive partition that doublespace had taken over, so it saw our 80mb hard drive as a 1-ish mb hard drive that was too small to install to.
Format couldn't see it, and fdisk couldn't either, so I could not start over from scratch no matter what I did.
Queue me panicking.
My mom was at work overnight. I had until she got back to fix it or I was dead meat.
I had no money, I was a child. I had no one and nothing to turn to other than the user manuals that came with the operating systems
I knew how to make a bootable floppy disk, and using that knowledge and a nat 20 inspiration roll I made a bootable dos 6.22 floppy disk that had the doublespace system on it, booted the home pc with that, used the doublespace software to revert the drive, and then was able to reinstall dos 5, upgrade to 6.22, install windows 3.1 and all of my moms software to finish up about 15 minutes before she arrived home in the morning.
The first thing my mom did when she got home was boot up the family PC. She was a little peeved that her solitaire high score got erased but everything else was fine.
Yep, that one time when all those supposed GNU/FOSS types suddenly fell in love with software patents. Who could forget...
Licensing Compaq DOS back to Microsoft was a mistake. It gave Microsoft’s OS incumbency. The PC industry has been suffering from that decision ever since.
Hindsight view. At the time Microsoft was the "open" little guy fighting the big evil monopolist IBM. The MS monopoly wasn't so total, and Linux servers spread everywhere. Extremely unlikely that would have happened had Microchannel dreams come true, as IBM intended to limit PCs to the low-end.
Linux servers in the 80s?
You would have relegated Dell and Gateway 2000 to second tier-PC clone maker along with all the other PC clone makers, below Compaq, since their OEM version of MS-DOS wouldn't get the Compaq tweaks necessary to be 100% IBM PC compatible (unless Microsoft or these non-Compaq OEMs duplicated Compaq's compatibility work).
They could have licensed Compaq’s version.
By the way, the Gateway 2000 was a machine by Gateway, not a vendor.
No.
Gateway 2000 was the actual name of the company at that time.
They dropped the 2000 close to the year 2000. I assume it wouldn't look good for a forward-looking tech company to be named for a year in the past.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gateway_2000
Well, that explains why I had thought it was a very popular model. :/
I remember going to the huge Compaq Singapore factory in Yishun in 1992, which had around 1600 employees, to assess if we can take over the support of their Banyan Vines system, as a junior engineer. 7 years later, in 1999, they laid off everyone and closed the factory, which supplied 90% of Compaq's PC boards worldwide.
Compaq's CEO at the time of the Compaq downsizing and eventual acquisition, Michael Capellas, is now the advisor to the company I work for. And the man who sold the Banyan Vines solution to Compaq in the 90's is now my boss.
If you want to watch a documentary about the forming of Compaq and its rise, Silicon Cowboys is not bad.
Trailer is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wjJYqUkHd8
You can watch the documentary on Tubi https://tubitv.com/movies/559438/silicon-cowboys
As an aside, I worked on fixing computers way back when. Somewhere along the line (maybe late 80s, early 90s) Compaq started using these cheap aluminum screws to hold together the computer case and hard drive mounts and motherboard to the chassis. Those cheap screws would get stripped very easily. Many a day, I would curse Compaq. But then, later, it seemed like all the manufacturers turned to cheaper and cheaper quality parts.
One story I remember reading was about the high quality and robustness of Compaq hardware. [Web search sucks these days so google and bing can't find the story]
The story goes that the floppy disk drive for Compaq computers was rated for a very high number of floppy disk insertions and ejections. More insertions/ejections than were possible unless one was doing nothing but inserting and ejecting floppy disks all the time.
So the exec selected a lower-rated floppy disk drive, saving a bunch of money.
I remember reading the quotes asking one of the founders why they left Texas Instruments and his reply was "the prospect of vast personal wealth".
My understanding is that they had pitched the IBM PC compatible machine to TI and had been rebuffed - TI had its own mostly compatible PC offering and the no one in charge was willing to admit it was a mistake.
IBM might have lost, yet thanks to the way computing has evolved, vertical integration has won in the end.
Going to a computer shop on a random shopping mall, usually only a few gamer PCs are available as composable desktops, 90% of computers on display are laptops.
Servers are mostly designed for companies with racks or hyperscalers.
Most non technical people nowadays only have a smartphone and a tablet as computers, with the integration of all 8 and 16 bit home computers PC compatible were fighting against.
Apple may be vertically integrated (depending on how you figure Foxconn and TSMC), but no other machines are.
CPU from Amd/Intel, board from someone else, ram from someone else, storage from another party, OS from yet another party.
Phones are similar, maybe Samsung uses a samsung cpu, a samsung lcd, samsung ram, and samsung storage, and a Samsung build of a Google OS. More integration than Apple. Everyone else though, is still putting parts together from many suppliers.
You completely missed the point, which laptops, phones or tablets can you still buy at a regular consumer shop, that are still as configurable as old time PCs?
Have you tried to build a laptop or a tablet yourself as we used to build PCs during the 1990s?
Yes we know about System 76, and similar attempts, sadly they aren't something I can find on MediaMarket, Vobis, FNAC, Saturn, Cool Blue, Carrefour,...
Oh sure, computers are more integrated now. But you said vertically integrated which I was addressing.
Really though, when the CPU has everything you need, other than ram and storage, why do you need to have a box you can mess with?
I still build my own computers, but computers at home are becoming endangered. One of my siblings simply doesn't have one, and the other only has a work computer. Many of my child's friends don't have a computer at home, unless it's a school chromebook or their parents work in tech.
Very interesting. I'm curious what the os2museum.com can say -- if anything -- on this. A deeply technical perspective, as in knowing the actual bit-by-bit internals, can shed much more light.
os2museum.com was just recently able to trace how one particular DOS bug (more than two BIOS harddisk drives would make earlier DOS-versions hang at boot) was handled across different companies, and how and when exactly a fix made it into actual MS-DOS.
The context there was Compaq sold some of the highest-end PC systems, they were into 386/486, servers, UNIX, SMP, rackmount, RAID, etc, "IBM wouldn't sell you this stuff". So, reading between the lines there, Compaq ran into this problem first and 'fixed-it' in a backwards compatible way.
(Compaq had a fantastic reputation which they tarred with shitty consumer PCs. HPE still sells Proliants, and I'd guess they still use 'compaq screws'.)
Rod Canion interviewed on "How I Built This"
https://podcasts.apple.com/tr/podcast/compaq-computers-rod-c...
I only ever had a laptop from Compaq, and it was the most robust and minimalist thing, like a solemn thinkpad, which is as impossible a statement as sincere. Then they got bought and I got one from their HP days that I returned straight away.
What an incredible read, the MS-DOS revelation is wow
Calling Caltech alum Ben Rosen just a technology analyst is under selling him a little bit.
> By March 1989, however, Hugh Barnes—now Compaq’s vice president of engineering—started to notice that Intel’s best chip people were being reassigned to other teams. Some quiet investigation revealed the cause. Sun Microsystems, one of Intel’s rivals, had announced chips based on a new design approach called reduced-instruction-set computing (RISC). For Intel, this presented a threat to its higher-end, large computer and mainframe markets. It was now shifting to focus on that threat instead.
> At a hotel room in Silicon Valley, in April 1989, Canion and Gates met with Andy Grove and Intel chair Gordon Moore to try to persuade them to stick with 486 development. After considerable back and forth, Intel reversed course. The new chip launched in late 1989.
Could this be the moment that forever saddled us (and Intel) with the cumbersome legacy of x86? It seems like a great cultural win for PCs in the moment, but in hindsight this decision almost feels backwards somehow.
I'd say no. We would have had the Itanium drama 10 years earlier. The i860 had some flashy features in it (integrated graphics, SIMD) but also the same Achilles' heel as Itanium of compiler-directed pipeline ordering. That made it much slower than other processors and any analyst of the time would have recommended staying on x86 for the performance and not having to change all your software. So AMD and Cyrix sell more chips and Intel has to backpedal to avoid completely losing the PC market.
It sounds like they are talking about the i860 which was launched and failed in the market. While it is possible that it might have had more success if Intel chose to abandon the x86 line with its launch, I think it is more likely that it would have accelerated AMDs move from a second-source x86 manufacturer to designing its own x86 chips.
The lesson of the article is that backwards compatibility is everything. By sticking with the 486, Intel succeeded fantastically. They even eventually succumbed to building AMD64 compatible chips.
i just watched Silicon Cowboys the other Day. Great documentary.
server seems down?
try https://archive.is/A8eQx