Comment by gruturo
1 day ago
> I can't really fault the 8086 designers for their decisions, since they made sense at the time. But if you could go back in a time machine, one could certainly give them a lot of advice!
Thanks for capturing my feeling very precisely! I was indeed thinking what they could have done better with the same approximate number of transistor and the benefit of a time traveler :) And yes the constraints you mention (8080 compatibility, etc) indeed limit their leeway so maybe we'd have to point the time machine at a few years earlier and influence the 8080 first
What's that military adage? Something along the lines of 'planned to win the (prior) war'?
There's also the needs of the moment. Wasn't the 8086 a 'drop in' replacement for the 8080, and also (offhand recollection) limited by the number of pins on some of it's package options? This was still an era when it was common for even multiple series of computers from a vendor to have incompatible architectures that required at the very least recompiling software if not whole new programs.