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I agree that the term is historical. The mid-range position is not, though. You make very good points about the heritage of PC's from micros. I would counter with a few opinions: - Yes, NT was put out by the quintessential microcomputer software company. It happened as that company hired the quintessential minicomputer OS architect, Dave Cutler, away from DEC. Allegedly he brought along DEC code (the proposed VMS successor Mica) and Microsoft later settled with DEC by paying them $150 million. See History of Microsoft Windows. - The single-chip microprocessor was definitely the innovation that made the microcomputer possible. But other than being on a single silicon die, today's CPU's have far more internal architecture in common with minicomputer CPU's than they have in common with the 8086. Today's Pentium IV is more like a superscalar pipelined RISC CPU with an x86 instruction set emulation layer than it is like the 8086. Itanium's design is based more on PA-RISC than x86, with emulation layers for both. Alpha is, well, Alpha. - And, of course, IBM was the mainframe and later mini (s34, 36, 38 before AS400, and don't forget RS6000) company. I'm thinking the argument of more or less like one or the other is perhaps not useful, and I made a to-do over nothing. Perhaps we should say something along the lines of "current personal computers evolved out of microcomputers by integrating the features of minicomputers" or something like that. I'll stick that in and you can revise as you see fit, in good Wiki style. Thanks for the good debate --Alan Millar Alan, right back atcha. (Don't know if I had a bad tone, I'm not trying to sound confrontational about this; tho I guess to some people it is more like a religious argument!) --Justfred |
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