Didn't see anyone mention it, but one should recall that the whole memory space on the 8088/8086 was 1M, so a 'limit' (whatever kind) of 640K wasn't the dumbest computer design decision ever made. In addition to that, Intel was telling people to get ready to jump to iAXP432 because 8086/80286 was nothing but a stopgap, and anyway the 80286 was for high-end minicomputer replacements, so why assume that more than 1M on an 8086-type CPU for PCs for an OS that was going to be obsoleted anyway was the future.
KJ On Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 1:26 AM Ethan Dicks via cctalk < cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 16, 2023 at 10:26 PM Tomasz Rola via cctalk > <cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > > I guess we are all prisoners of our own mental frame. I recall that > > Ken Olsen (DEC founder), once quipped "There is no reason for any > > individual to have a computer in his home." - that was in 1977, > > according to wikiquote: > > > > https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ken_Olsen > > One version of that story is he told it to David Ahl who was trying to > pitch a <$2000 PDP-8 for the home market (IIRC a configuration like a > 4-slot box with a KK8A, some basic I/O and a smallish MOS RAM card - > too small to compete with a "real" PDP-8 system). > > Ken's reaction was an element of what led to David going off to found > Creative Computing, as the story goes. > > -ethan >
