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Intel 8086 Considered Harmful

11:30am, Monday 28 April 2003

I saw this re-posted on a newsgroup; the original was written in November 1999. Still a bit depressing.

I was at Intel when the 8086 was under development. Few people know
that it was never meant to be a product; it was a test architecture
from  the lab that was trotted out frantically to kill design-in deals
for the upcoming Z8000, which with its DEC- like symmetric register
architecture was thought to be a revolutionary product. Then Zilog
released the Z8000 with bugs, and the 8086 went out with its perverse
segmentation registers, beginning a tradition of squirrelly programming
practices.

The Intel/Microsoft empire is built on a heart of darkness -
expedience, cynicism, and greed.

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