25th Anniversary of the Personal Computer" 4213

In the context in which I was replying (...the subject at hand...) yes, pretty certain. See following.

Now you're talking road maps. The 68010, at least, was on the Motorola road map at the time. I saw it. I also recall that the announcement (note "announcement", not "introduction") of the 80286 was something of a surprise at our shop, and other places I had contact with, and we had an NDA with Intel. The expectation was that the 8086 was it. There might be improvements to it (such as the 80186), but there would be no extensive architectural changes.

deciding while the

As someone else pointed out, the 8086 was the stop gap. I got the generations wrong. They were all successors to the stop-gap, which in the end turned out to be the main bet.

of June

No, it was a cheaper microcontroller counterpart to the 8086. Compare the feature set of the 80186 with the 80286. Heck, just compare the register set.

As the paragraph you responded to showed, the 286 appeared at least four moths earlier. The feature set of the 80186-8 is a slightly extended (five new instructions, as I recall) chip count reduced version of the 8086-8.

I can see an argument for that point of view. The '186 was still an 8086 at heart, with some minor improvements oriented towards embedded use. The '010 extended the 68K family in the other direction, most notibly adding features which made virtual memory much easier to implement.

- Bill