Date   : Tue, 03 Apr 1990 10:42:00 EST
From   : "No, me?" <JSHIN%HAMPVMS.BITNET@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU>
Subject: Non-Intel Bashing...

Hmmmm.....

This is a serious matter, you see.

Personally, I think everything that Intel has ever come up with tend to
be rather demented; especially the iAPX86 family.  The segmentation system
is totally absurd.  The Queues on the lower processors are totally
mundane.  The processing time is totally outrageous.  The architecture
(the way they have the registers set up) makes absolutely no sense.

Aside from the compatibility, there is no reason why ANYONE should be
*%&('ing using any of Intel's higher-level processors.  Intel-compatible
op. codes are assembler programmers' worst nightmare - they are as
far away from natural language as humanly possible.

At least Zilog (although owned by Exxon) had the heart and the humaneness
enough to make sense out of the 8080/5 and create a more useful
(although subject to similar limitations) processors.

The step which Intel took from the 8080 family to iAPX432 was a
totally logical one - they found a fatal bug in 432 and had to pull
it out of production.  8086 makes as much sense as a pile of rocks
in the middle of Interstate 91.

I should admit that 8080 was the first very-commercially-successful
processor that popularized microcomputing, and 8086 family IS teh
most commercially successful one (although only at the consumer-product
level), I think there is a reason why:
   -people abandoned 8080 for Z80
   -people abandoned 8086 for 68000
   -people never thought of using 8086 where they are using 32000 and Z80,000
    these days.
(oops; I forgot a "but" in the paragraph above.)

Someone should come up with the guts and money to speed up Z80;
with current AS-TTL technology, we can pull it up to 100MHz!!!  Look
out Intel (Intel does, however, make some mean peripheral chips.)!

     -John


End of INFO-CPM Digest V90 Issue #53
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