| Yes, for better or worse ugly is definitely a 2nd-order predictor of success. I guess "ugly" is a fair assessment of the 8086 at the time. Certainly the 68000 was a much cleaner and orthogonal architecture. On the other hand, I'd rate the 8086 at least as good as if not better than other contemporary microprocessors such as the Z-80 and 6502. The 6809 was sweet but a 16 bit address space rooted it in the previous direction and the 68000 make it clear that the 6809 wasn't in Motorola's future plans. Sure, had IBM chosen the 6809 there surely would have been a compatible follow-on but I can't imagine even the stanchest IBMer to have that kind of hubris. But calling MS-DOS ugly at the time would have been unfair. It was as capable as any other microcomputer OS at the time in the home computer space. It was widely proclaimed to be a rip-off of CP/M so we might take that as a compliment and if you look at TRS-DOS, Apple DOS or whatever PET's used it was just fine. It'd be unrealistic to suggest and mini or mainframe OS was an option and Unix just wasn't there yet. If IBM had given Microsoft more lead time they might have went with Xenix which they did have out in 1981 for the Z-8001. I'm not so sure IBM would have been interested, though, as they wouldn't have an exclusive license to the OS. Not to mention that the overhead of the operating system was an important consideration. The machines didn't have much capacity to waste and whatever you picked it still had to perform well on a system with only floppy drives. Maybe that in itself doesn't rule out Unix but it sure cramps the design space. In both cases, CPU and OS, the ugliness really took off with backward compatibility to maintain. The 80286 was already being designed so it drove that deeper into the weeds and there was no way of bypassing MS-DOS compatibility once it anchored the marketplace. The only way forward was to improve the OS while keeping MS-DOS programs running and the whole OS/2 debacle only helped to delay that upward path. I mean, fair enough to say "ugly won" but some consideration should be given to the lay of the land when these long-term trends were set in motion. |