Re: the 286, Byte ordering

In article <6d5fa21e63e14491948ffb6a9d08485a@www.novabbs.org>,
mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote:

On Sun, 5 Jan 2025 2:56:08 +0000, John Levine wrote:

They also apparently didn't expect people to switch segments much.

 
Clearly. They expected segments to be essentially stagnant--unlike
the people trying to do things with x86s...

An idea: The target markets for the 8080 and 8085 were clearly embedded
systems. The Z80 and 6502 rapidly became popular in the micro-computer
market, but the 808[05] did not. Intel may still have been thinking in
terms of embedded systems when designing the 80286.

The IBM PC was launched in August 1981 and around a year passed before it
became clear that this machine was having a huge and lasting effect on
the market. The 80286 was released on February 1st 1982, although it
wasn't used much in PCs until the IBM PC/AT in August 1984.

The 80386 sampled in 1985 and was mass-produced in 1986. That would seem
to have been the first version of x86 where it was obvious at the start
of design that use in general-purpose computers would be important. It
was far more suitable for the job than the 80286, and things developed
from there.

John