It was the morons in the behemoth IBM organization who put the maximum on the PC memory complement. You couldn't even run MS-Dos in the 16KB version. The guys who designed the PC weren't stupid, but they were hobbled by the huge megacorp attitudes.

Down in my basement, somewhere, there's a painted-IBM-blue S100 box that I got from one of the guys who had returned to Niwot from Boca Raton after working on the original development of the PC. When I got it, it contained a CPU, some memory, and an I/O board, all typical of then-popular technology for personal computers.

They'd considered the Intel CPU, and the Motorola 68008, as well as the 68000, which management quashed right away as they didn't want a marketplace collision with their much more costly laboratory computers, the 6809, which is what was in the box, now in my basement, and probably one or two others. However, when they were getting into some trouble with schedule and budget, someone offered them a look at a PCB that had been a development prototype for the 80186, and they liked that. They just changed the form factor and added an expansion bus on the order of what they'd seen on the then-popular Apple-][.

Intel just wanted to make the sale. IBM just wanted to meet schedule within budget, which they didn't do.

I don't think it's appropriate to blame Mr. Bill for making the second-biggest mistake ever made in the history of the universe. The amount of DRAM in the box was a choice made to get it past their own management. <sigh> If they'd just used a reasonable architecture ...

RE