On: Acer Aspire 1 ARM Laptop Has Nearly Complete Upstr...

[pjmlp]

Many forget x86 is only as it is due to IBM's failure to keep it theirs, and Microsoft's hardware requirements for their OSes.

[chasil → pjmlp]

Can you imagine how awful things would be if the 80286 on the Microchannel bus had won?

This was the target for IBM OS/2, and they had little interest in the flat memory model of the 80386.

[pjmlp → chasil]

Different, awful not really, OS/2 was a great OS, full of cool features.

OOP based, SOM, Smalltalk as one of the main application languages, CSet++.

[hakfoo → chasil]

Was it that they weren't interested in the 386, or had they already promised OS/2 for the 286, and now had to honour the cheque Marketing wrote?

It's possible they got lapped by Compaq to the 386 because MCA was so much new and custom tooling and they had to deploy an entire coherent ecosystem on day 1, rather than just saying "It's an AT with a faster CPU."