How the 8080 Changed and Dominated Computing with x86

How the 8080 Changed and Dominated Computing with x86

from wikipedia

Industry change[edit]

The 8080 also changed how computers were created. When the 8080 was introduced, computer systems were usually created by computer manufacturers such asDigital Equipment Corporation, Hewlett Packard, or IBM. A manufacturer would produce the entire computer, including processor, terminals, and system software such as compilers and operating system. The 8080 was actually designed for just about any application except a complete computer system. Hewlett Packard developed the HP 2640 series of smart terminals around the 8080. The HP 2647 was a terminal which ran BASIC on the 8080. Microsoft would market as its founding product the first popular programming language for the 8080, and would later acquire DOS for the IBM-PC.

The 8080 and 8085 gave rise to the 8086, which was designed as a source compatible (although not binary compatible) extension of the 8085. This design, in turn, later spawned the x86 family of chips, the basis for most CPUs in use today. Many of the 8080's core machine instructions and concepts, for example, registers namedA, B, C and D, as well as many of the flags used to control conditional jumps, are still in use in the widespread x86 platform. 8080 Assembler code can still be directly translated into x86 instructions; all of its core elements are still present.

PCs based upon the 8086 design and its successors evolved into workstations and servers of 16, 32 and 64 bits, with advanced memory protection, segmentation, and multiprocessing features, blurring the difference between small and large computers (the 80286 and 80386's protected mode were important in doing so). The size of chips has grown so that the size and power of large x86 chips is not much different from high end architecture chips, and a common strategy to produce a very large computer is to network many x86 processors.

The basic architecture of the 8080 and its successors has replaced many proprietary midrange and mainframe computers, and withstood challenges of technologies such as RISC. Most computer manufacturers have abandoned producing their own processors below the highest performance points. Though x86 may not be the most elegant, or theoretically most efficient design, the sheer market force of so many dollars going into refining a design has made the x86 family today, and will remain for some time, the dominant processor architecture, even bypassing Intel's attempts to replace it with incompatible architectures such as the iAPX 432 andItanium.