Re: Did Commodore cheat with the quad density floppies?

On Mon, Jan 14, 2019 at 7:30 PM Mia Magnusson <mia_at_plea.se> wrote:
> No, people hated PS/2 because most of the changes were unnecessary and
> didn't provide any benefit to the user.

The benefits of the PS/2 was on the IBM side, to attempt to recapture
the desktop from the Taiwanese clone makers.

> They could also have retained the ISA bus along the MCA bus to not lock
> out customers of many of the add-on cards.

But that was the entire point of the MCA bus - a proprietary bus (that
did happen to include some technical fixes to real limitations of the
ISA bus) to promote corporate sales of genuine IBM machines.  The last
thing IBM wanted was a bus anyone could make cards for.

The ad campaign that ensued was literally to create demand for MCA
machines because when they first came out, their marketing efforts
determined that customers had no idea what a "Microchannel Bus" was or
why they would need one.  Mostly, they touted multitasking (vs
overcoming the limited bandwidth of what was essentially an 8MHz 80286
system bus) but really, the coming of Windows 3.x created the demand
for _some_ graphic bus, and outside of IBM, that followed the VLB->PCI
progression.

-ethan