Posted by Jay G. on 06/12/06 12:11

On Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:45:26 GMT, Roy L. Fuchs wrote:

> On Sun, 11 Jun 2006 22:17:46 -0500, "Jay G." <Jay@tmbg.org> Gave us:
>>
>>Frankly, by the time you used the phrase "PC-like," you had lost your
>>original argument, although you didn't notice it.
>
> Not at all. A "Personal Computer" (PC) has a user interface
> (keyboard)

....or (remote control) or (keypad), since you think cell phones count as
PCs.

> and has several functions which all of us with any brains
> have come to know that are what constitute a personal computing
> experience. Just because some of the same guts got used in the thing
> does NOT make it a personal computer.


> The i80186 never made it into a PC

*Ahem*
http://www.sothius.com/hypertxt/welcome.html?siemenspcd.html

> As a result, the i80186 chip ended up getting used
> in industrial controls... for decades! Nobody went around calling
> ANY of those devices a PC....

Did those devices run a PC OS? Did they have a PC amount of RAM? Did they
have PC connectors to the drives they ran?

From what I can find, they weren't called "PCs" because they were called
other types of computers, like servers:

http://temperature.tu-plovdiv.bg/publications/CS05_kakanakov_spasov.pdf
The experiment is made on the IPC@Chip® from Beck as a target system
(server). It has a NE2000 compatible network interface card, built-in
card driver, Real-time oper-ating system and embedded TCP/IP stack.
Its core is an I80186 microprocessor with 512MB RAM and 512MB Flash
drive. The server side code is written in C and uses op-erating
system’s APIs for creating and manipulating sockets

Find me a consumer device along the lines of a DVD player or alarm clock
that used a i80186 chip and you might have a point.

-Jay

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