25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" 4212

True, but irrelevant to the subject (why was the 8088 chosen) at hand. The 80286 laying a couple of years in the future was not likely to be a deciding point. And now that I think of it, wasn't the 80286 actually a stop-gap while roadmap in 1978-9.

while a

The 186-8 was out until 1982 either. It's real advantage was to reduce the chip count from an 8086-8, but with the 80286 coming out before it (see below) most people doing a pre-286 system already had a design using the 8088-86 and wouldn't have bothered to redesign. There wasn't any real motivation to build a computer around it, unless you didn't want to pay for an 80286, didn't want to commit to a 16 bit data bus or wanted to basically produce a PC clone and liked the reduced chipset advantage. Several saw one or more of those arguments as valid. I recall a Tandy machine. And I remember a couple of back-breaker (heavy, large) early laptops using the CMOS version. Mostly, though, the reduced chipset got it into places one would use a microcontroller these days, such as the ISA cards you mention.

The 80286 was introduced in February of 1982. The 80186 was announced June of the same year. Since all the sources I've dug up showed the 80186-8 being available in '82, I buttume it was introduced (released) somewhere between June and the end of the year.

- Bill