<story><title>The Itanic Has Sunk</title><url>https://honeypot.net/post/the-itanic-has-sunk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sbierwagen</author><text>Fun fact, Intel did this &lt;i&gt;exact thing&lt;/i&gt; once before, in 1981, with the iAPX 432: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Intel_iAPX_432&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Intel_iAPX_432&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power &lt;i&gt;calculators,&lt;/i&gt; of all things. iAPX 432 was a clean sheet 32 bit design designed for high level languages and &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; computers, kind of like mini Lisp machines, complete with native machine support for garbage collection. But it was taking a while to get out the door, and performance wasn&amp;#x27;t so great, so they hacked together a quick upgrade to the 8080... the 8088, which was used in the original IBM PC.&lt;p&gt;History takes over from there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>masswerk</author><text>&amp;gt; They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power calculators, of all things.&lt;p&gt;The 8008 was the (slower) single-chip implementation of the Datapoint 2200 terminal&amp;#x27;s processor. The DP 2200 was a serial terminal capable of running code on its own as a standalone machine, conceived in 1969 (originally as a drop-in replacement for the IBM 129 key punch), announced in 1970, and eventually introduced in 1971. Datapoint had commissioned the chip, but rejected the result, as it was slower than the discrete logic design, with rights for the chip-implementation remaining at Intel. This remarkable terminal has been with us ever since.&lt;p&gt;[0] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Datapoint_2200&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Datapoint_2200&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The Itanic Has Sunk</title><url>https://honeypot.net/post/the-itanic-has-sunk/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sbierwagen</author><text>Fun fact, Intel did this &lt;i&gt;exact thing&lt;/i&gt; once before, in 1981, with the iAPX 432: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Intel_iAPX_432&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Intel_iAPX_432&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;They had made the 8008 and 8080, but those were awkward and ungainly chips meant to power &lt;i&gt;calculators,&lt;/i&gt; of all things. iAPX 432 was a clean sheet 32 bit design designed for high level languages and &lt;i&gt;real&lt;/i&gt; computers, kind of like mini Lisp machines, complete with native machine support for garbage collection. But it was taking a while to get out the door, and performance wasn&amp;#x27;t so great, so they hacked together a quick upgrade to the 8080... the 8088, which was used in the original IBM PC.&lt;p&gt;History takes over from there.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>criticas</author><text>There were two competing schools of thought in the late &amp;#x27;70s and early &amp;#x27;80s.&lt;p&gt;One said that computer hardware should have hardware support for high level languages.  That school led to the VAX, iAPX432, and 80X86.  
The other school said that computer hardware should be simple so that it could go faster, and that the compiler should be smart enough to map high level languages to simple hardware.&lt;p&gt;Intel was firmly in the first camp.  It flirted with the second repeatedly: see the late &amp;#x27;80s i860&amp;#x2F;i960.  Itanium was the biggest bet placed:  it was a RISC-like architecture with the added complexity of multiple dispatch encoded in it&amp;#x27;s Very Long Instruction Word architecture.  The compiler could rearrange instruction order to keep hardware busy, AND (to some extent) instruction contents.&lt;p&gt;Itanium seemed like a reasonable bet, and Intel (and HP) had the clout to convince others.  It was a factor in the decline of the Alpha and MIPS server market, and even Sun hedged its bets by porting Solaris.</text></comment>