From: mlh1@bunny.gte.com (Michael Hackney) Subject: Re: Intel, the Pentium and Linux Date: 1 Apr 1993 21:23:29 GMT
In article <16BA393A6.INABU@ibm.rz.tu-clausthal.de>,
INABU@ibm.rz.tu-clausthal.de (Arnd Burghardt) wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
> >
> Yesterday i visited the CEBIT (hannover, germany), where Intel was presenting
> the Pentium (586) processor. They had four (in words 4) machines with this
> beast running. So they presented it nicely (unly by running picture shows),
> this i could do on a 80286 ;-)). The presentor promised it to be binary
> compatible to the i486, and I said I don't believe. I showed him a ONE_DISK_
> Linux-System (Emergency disk, with patched lilo to boot from disk), and said
> him : Convice me, boot this : No guts, no glory ! A he decided no glory.
> He won't let anybody touch his holy cows, and not even boot a suspect OS.
> >
> I thought by myself 'This is the coward of the day' and went back to earth.
> >
> What cn we learn : this technology is far from industrial-standarts, so you
> can expect this beast in your local computer-shop at least in spring next
> year....
> >
> only my 2cents....
> >
Having given Dog and Pony demos at trade shows myself, I must sympathize
with the presentor. Even though your intentions were honorable, he has no
idea what is on your disk. We once stuck a patron's disk in a Macintosh at
a trade show only to discover he had a small code resource that attempted
to write our application out to his disk! (luckily, our app was > 800k and
it caused the copy to break). Nice guy too... Intel has too much invested
in 486 to not provide backward compatibility. Their past history speaks for
itself.
too bad though!
michael