'My favorite platform' debate (was: Rack Mount Servers)

[Jerry Feldman]

Much goes back to the design of the 8088 chip and its implementation in the 
original PC. The larger onboard memory really required the 386 chip 
(although the 286 changed some stuff). The other limitation was DOS, which 
operated in realmode. Essentially, Windows 95 started the ball rolling on 
that.
In Redmond's favor, any GUI is going to be somewhat of a memory hog. 
My programming background is on the old IBM mainframe's with 32K or on 4K 
PDP-8s. When memory is constrained, the programmer uses many memory saving 
tricks including using the subroutine return slots (on the 8) as temporary 
data stores or using an instruction as a mask.
When the PC was designed, there was a rather small market. You had the 
Apple II with 16K, and a few other 8080, z80, m6800, or 6502. The PC used 
the 8088 (which is the 8 bit version of the newer 8086 line. Coming from 8 
bits to 16 bits was a big move.
"Brenda A. Bell" wrote:

> Somewhere on the Internet there's an anthology of hilarious quotes... I
> believe it was someone from IBM who said "why would anyone ever need
> more than 640K RAM in a personal computer".  I don't think anyone knew
> what was going to happen in this space.  As much as I hate to give them
> credit for anything, I believe Redmond is greatly responsible for the
> kind of PC hardware we have today... Windows 3.1 was a hog, but people
> wanted it and the hardware vendors did what they needed to to keep up.
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
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