Hacker News Reader

Comment by microtherion | Hacker News Reader

> it took a vertically integrated market and made it a horizontally integrated market

I find that a curious statement. While there was quite a bit of diversity in microprocessors, microcomputer manufacturers almost never built their own processors. The majority of the 8 bit market was 6502 and Z80, with a smattering of 8080 and 6809. The 16 bit market mostly was 68000.

Neither Motorola nor Intel were big players in microcomputer manufactoring. The 6502 story is a bit more complicated: MOS sold the KIM-1. And MOS itself were bought by Commodore, though there were several 6502 manufacturers.

The only microcomputer manufacturers I can think of that truly designed their processors were Acorn and Texas Instruments.

View on HN

At that time microcomputers were still a small portion of the computer business. Most of the market was for mainframes and minicomputers, which were vertically integrated.

But the 8086 was used in microcomputers, not mainframes or minis.

The broader interpretation of this idea, that the x86 era saw a shift away from vertically integrated computer manufacturing, is absolutely true. The narrower interpretation, that the 8086 chip triggered a shift away from vertically integrated computer manufacturing, is not.

The "x86 era" is really the era of microcomputer architectures eating mainframes and minis. I suspect that would still have happened if the 68k (or Z8000, NS32000, etc) had won the war instead of the x86.

>I suspect that would still have happened if the 68k (or Z8000, NS32000, etc) had won the war instead of the x86.

I think that is probably correct. The economics of "commodity" microprocessors were such that one (or two) would have probably won had the x86 not. (Of course, the shift to horizontal is not just about the microprocessor but volume operating systems, volume scale out servers, packaged software and open source, etc.

Random data point. In 1977, a couple of serious business industrial machines from two worlds:

Cromemco Z-2: 8-bit Z80 @ 4 MHz, maximum 256 kB RAM (bank-switched in a 64 kB address space), 0.007 Whetstone MIPS [1]

VAX-11/780: 32-bit VAX @ 5 MHz, maximum 8 MB RAM, 0.476 Whetstone MIPS [1]

I have no idea what the prices were. One source reckons a Z-2 was $995 [2], but a price list from 1983 has a system with 64 kB and two floppy drives for $4695 [3]. In 1978, the list price of a 11/780 with half a megabyte of memory, a floppy drive, a tape drive, and two hard disk spindles (possibly not including disk packs, though) was $241,255 [4].

[1] https://amaus.net/static/S100/cromemco/IOnews/05x04%20198607...

[2] https://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=559

[3] http://www.hartetechnologies.com/manuals/Cromemco/Cromemco%2...

[4] https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/otherports/32v.pdf

the 68000 is a 32 bit cpu

The registers were 32 bit, but the data bus on the OG 68000 was 16 bit. I tend to count the latter width (I don't see the Z80 as a 16 bit processor either).

To make things even more confusing, the Z80's ALU operates on 4 bits at a time while the 68000 has 3 16 bit ALUs and so can crunch 48 bits per clock.

Half of the early ads for the 68000 called it a 16 bit processor and the rest 32 bits. The latter became more popular as time went on.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com