Why did IBM choose the 8088?

[carlsson]

Well, we would need a figure of how many businesses had computerized their operations in 1979 (well before the IBM PC) compared to 1982 (after it was introduced). Apple indeed was the strongest competitor and famously made full page advertisements "Welcome IBM" at the PC introduction. Still I think Apple & the others had not been able to gain the full ... not sure if trust is the word I'm looking for, perhaps confidence ... from the business market to convert as many big, medium sized and small companies as possible to start using computers. Perhaps the market was ready for the next generation of computer applications with or without IBM's entry, we'll never be able to tell. Perhaps some smaller businesses were inspired but couldn't quite justify neither IBM nor Apple so they looked at the cheaper home/gaming systems for serious use, meaning the entry of IBM could have increased the market in total as much as they stole market shares from others.

[Keatah]

22 hours ago, bluejay said:

I completely agree on the fact that 386 or better PCs were what really made PC gaming great, along with VGA graphics and the Sound Blaster. It really made the personal computer competitive with video game consoles. Playing games on a 5150 would be kind of like trying to race a van. It's can be done, and with the right upgrades rather well, but it's really not designed for it.

I might say "not yet evolved" rather than "not designed for it". I say that because the PC architecture is very compatible. Very Russian Doll like. The early 8088/8086 stuff is still there. It's just buried under bigger better faster things. The 16-bit ISA bus is still available today on a modern i9 through the LPC header. And the real physical ISA slots still worked on Pentium III machines. In fact my vintage P3 1400MHz has them. Have a SoundBlaster in there.

 

And of course you can run old code on modern i9 machines too. I9 has the original x87, x86 instructions available.

[bluejay]

8 minutes ago, Keatah said:

I might say "not yet evolved" rather than "not designed for it". I say that because the PC architecture is very compatible. Very Russian Doll like. The early 8088/8086 stuff is still there. It's just buried under bigger better faster things. The 16-bit ISA bus is still available today on a modern i9 through the LPC header. And the real physical ISA slots still worked on Pentium III machines. In fact my vintage P3 1400MHz has them. Have a SoundBlaster in there.

 

And of course you can run old code on modern i9 machines too. I9 has the original x87, x86 instructions available.

Suppose so. But I mean, I don't think IBM designed the 5150 to be a game machine. It just evolved to be a nice game machine much into the future, and with a lot of help from 3rd party manufacturers.

[mr_me]

The apple iii was still a 6502 8-bit computer.  There was an 8-bit standard for small business at the time and it was based on cp/m and the z80.  Just like the ms-dos era, there were lots of manufacturers making these cp/m machines including xerox, eagle, north star, osborne, and kaypro.

 

Apple did well in schools but overall they were outsold by tandy, commodore, and even atari.  Apple was the most expensive and the only one to survive.

Edited November 6, 2020 by mr_me

[Krebizfan]

4 hours ago, mr_me said:

The apple iii was still a 6502 8-bit computer.  There was an 8-bit standard for small business at the time and it was based on cp/m and the z80.  Just like the ms-dos era, there were lots of manufacturers making these cp/m machines including xerox, eagle, north star, osborne, and kaypro.

 

Apple did well in schools but overall they were outsold by tandy, commodore, and even atari.  Apple was the most expensive and the only one to survive.

Apple wasn't the most expensive. Look at Cromemco or the Xerox 820 to see how expensive business 8-bit machines in the early 80s could get. Apple set the Apple II price as high as the home user would go for while maintaining a build quality acceptable to American business. Commodore might have been cheaper but Commodore forgot to make enough profit to cover the costs of running Commodore. 

 

I think that banking 8-bit machines had a viable chance to compete with the IBM PC and other 16-bit systems until about 1985 when 256 K started becoming the floor for XT clones. It might take slightly more work to take advantage of the banking but the user probably doesn't care about the challenges faced by a programmer. It was unfortunate that some 8-bit systems* released just before and slightly after the IBM PC turned out to be badly flawed. The 8-bits could and did survive after that holding on to markets priced below the XT clones. 

 

* Apple III, Xerox 820, Commodore B-series

[mr_me]

As I said, amongst the best selling computers of that era, tandy, commodore, atari; apple was the most expensive.

[desiv]

On 11/5/2020 at 3:19 AM, Keatah said:

I put a stop to the Amiga when word processing on it became more trouble than it was worth.

Luckily for me, I was a long time Wordperfect guy back then (well, after I had moved to that from Wordstar) and the Amiga Wordperfect worked just fine...

I eventually moved to Wordworth later on when someone ..er.. lent me a copy to try. But it took a while for me to stop using Wordperfect, mostly because even with the student discount it was spendy, so I was going to get my use out of it..

[Keatah]

Eagle, Cromemco, NorthStar, CompuColor. Vicariously loved those back in the day through books and pictures. The days of choosing between them, Apple II, and TRS-80. Thankfully I ended up with  Apple for reasons then and now.

 

Then:

Everything was new and exciting.

Had a nice-looking and complex-looking motherboard.²

Had lots of memory and color graphics and sound - even if both were pseudo.³

Lots of games!

Big pirate scene

Home utility software like PrintShop and Magic Window.

A surprising amount of friends had them despite the cost.

Remarkably good documentation.

Expandable via slots.

 

Now:

Parts readily available.

New old software is being archived daily.

Easy to maintain and repair over time.

New hobbyist hardware being produced.

High reliability - minus the ram in the II+ and //e, mostly //e.

 

..and likely more reasons I'm not thinking of at this instant. It should be noted that these reasons became apparent after the purchase, after the fact, with the exception of 2 & 3.

 

[jhd]

11 hours ago, Keatah said:

And of course you can run old code on modern i9 machines too. I9 has the original x87, x86 instructions available.

 

There is a text-based strategy game that I quite like. I originally played it ca. 1990 on an 8086. Whenever I upgrade to a new PC, I always install and play that game -- if for no other reason than to see how much faster it will run on a new system. ? We passed the point of absurdity some years ago. 

[bluejay]

Maybe Woz's autobiography isn't exactly a good place to grasp how well certain computers were selling.

Come to think of it, Apple wasn't really an appealing computer to anywhere except schools by the mid 1980s. They were expensive, they couldn't run CP/M or MS-DOS, (well the II could run CP/M with an expansion card but you get the point) and lower cost computers like the C64 had better graphics and sound. So Apple lost the home market to computers like the Commodore, CoCo, and Sinclair, and lost the business market the CP/M machines and the IBM PC. And as DOS computers came affordable the educational market was taken by the PC as well.

Well then who the hell did the Macintosh appeal to? It certainly gave the least bang for the buck at the time, but it must have been a great seller if it's become such an icon.

[Krebizfan]

The Apple II had a good amount of business software available for it in native mode so plenty of sales were to small businesses. Apple did charge a premium for the base unit while Commodore sold the base unit at close to cost hoping that sales of peripherals would yield profits. Taking a Visicalc setup (64K, 2 drives, 80 columns), the Apple II was very competitively priced compared to the competition and sometimes cheaper; much cheaper if the educational discount applied. That was the target for IBM and if the bulk and educational discounts are considered, the 5150 sat comfortably in the same price range. IBM didn't care about the very cheapest computers; they wanted to forestall the high-end machines starting to challenge minis the way that DEC minis were encroaching on the mainframe. If a PC was going to take over parts of the AS/400 market, it was going to be from IBM not a hypothetical Apple IV. 

 

Commodore had the B128 as the enhanced business 8-bit at a high price; Atari had the planned 1450XLD to better serve businesses than the 800 though the video game crash prevented release. 

 

The Mac appealed to few at first. Sales stalled at about 250,000 units and didn't really pick up until memory was increased and desktop publishing became a thing. That was more than the other 68000 based personal computers could muster but modest in the overall scheme of things. Fortunately for Apple, Mac users liked buying software and could keep a sizable industry afloat despite the limited number of machines. 

[desiv]

1 hour ago, bluejay said:

Come to think of it, Apple wasn't really an appealing computer to anywhere except schools by the mid 1980s.

Later 80's, sure...

But Mid 80's?  The Apple II line was still selling pretty well.

It was keeping Apple afloat thru the initial Mac rollout (which was pretty bad)...

 

Lot's of home and business users were still buying Apple IIs.

 

Yes, the C64 was starting to really take off in the home market, but that doesn't mean Apple IIs weren't also selling...  They were...

[Keatah]

Among all my school and neighborhood buddies, the Atari 400/800 and Apple II+ were the most desired computers. They were the computers that generated the most passion of imagination. Tons fun making up sci-fi stories about futuristic and (not so today) ridiculous capabilities.

 

Though I didn't see it at the time, the 386 years marked the beginning of visible progress pf the PCs future domination.

 

Macs were highly sought after for their WYSIWYG prowess. DTP was rather new and Macs helped usher in that phenomenon. It stayed a big selling point till MS Office applications and Adobe PDF became commonplace standards.

 

And finally. Apple II was popular in the sciences. There was a ton of one-off hardware for laboratory data acquisition tasks. And men of science liked the machines because it was very approachable and offered a variety of language packages that were affordable. As a matter of course I interviewed for job at the end of the dot-com era. And they had an Apple II on the production floor of a hi-tech research lab. I was about to ask what's with it. And the guy immediately stopped me and said it's what works and has proven itself to work time and again. Must have answered that question a trillion time before.

[mr_me]

21 hours ago, bluejay said:

Maybe Woz's autobiography isn't exactly a good place to grasp how well certain computers were selling.

Come to think of it, Apple wasn't really an appealing computer to anywhere except schools by the mid 1980s. They were expensive, they couldn't run CP/M or MS-DOS, (well the II could run CP/M with an expansion card but you get the point) and lower cost computers like the C64 had better graphics and sound. So Apple lost the home market to computers like the Commodore, CoCo, and Sinclair, and lost the business market the CP/M machines and the IBM PC. And as DOS computers came affordable the educational market was taken by the PC as well.

Well then who the hell did the Macintosh appeal to? It certainly gave the least bang for the buck at the time, but it must have been a great seller if it's become such an icon.

For the Apple II, 1984 was its best year.  It was third in market share after the C64 and IBM.  By that time tandy and atari were no longer relevent in terms of market share.  Macintosh sales were low, trailing apple ii until about 1987.  Apple II sales probably benefitted from all that macintosh marketing.  Apple II likely had a bigger software library compared to the c64, being an older computer; and it continued to be well supported by developers.

Edited November 7, 2020 by mr_me

[Keatah]

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

For the Apple II, 1984 was its best year.  It was third in market share after the C64 and IBM.  By that time tandy and atari were no longer relevent in terms of market share.

My personal best years with the Apple II, aside from when I initially got it, were 1980-1986. A time of BBSes, a time of new categories of software. And at the end a time of hard disks and interfacing to real computers like the IBM.

 

1 hour ago, mr_me said:

  Macintosh sales were low, trailing apple ii until about 1987.  Apple II sales probably benefitted from all that macintosh marketing.  Apple II likely had a bigger software library compared to the c64, being an older computer; and it continued to be well supported by developers.

Apple II definitely benefited. There were attempts to make a bit-mapped desktop complete with windows and folders and a real mouse pointer. Similar in capability and appearances to GEM. It didn't go over too well as the necessary programming was starting to push the Apple's limited 1MHz 65C02. And there were no primitives in firmware like with the Mac.

 

What was successful was the alternative. MouseText. This was the addition of basic lines and some symbols to the character set. MT would allow a developer to make windows-like graphics out of 100% text. This the 65C02 could handle with aplomb without slowdowns. It was passable. It worked without slowdowns. And AppleWorks and ProTerm became quite popular - to name a few.

[mr_me]

The other thing the apple ii had over the c64 was hardware options like the 80 column text expansion card and a much faster disk drive.  It also had the software supporting that 80 column text card.  So although it didn't have cp/m it had plenty of software support for business applications.  The biggest computer application at the time was still video games and that took the c64 to number one in market share in 1983/84..