First buttembly language encountershow to get started 561

Well, Duh!, and as you pointed out elsewhere the 8031-8051 style trumps even that.

But when Apple , Commodore, PET, Amiga and CP-M systems were all slugging it out, and the issue was the architecture dominance for desktop (which meant home or amateur computing at the time) -- Intel's compatibility choice won in that market at that time. Just like VHS beat beta, it wasn't about the best engineering.

For scientific and CAD workstations, the choices were different, of course. And 68000-architecture machines and various RISC chips dominated. And at other times things shifted in other ways.

But the decisions that Motorola made for the 68000 relative to the 6800 and Intel for the 8086 relative to the 8080 occured in a certain time frame, and the 8080 was not competing with 6800-ish things in the embedded market, the 8051 was. So bringing in later developments, or other markets, is ignoring the clear signalling for the context in which I made my remarks.

I certainly make no claim for those statements when applied in vastly different situations. In the battle for personal-computing dominance at the time of transition from 8 bit machines to 16 bit machines (i.e., original IBM PC, original Macintosh) that marketplace (and not others that aren't part of the discussion) rewarded Intel's decision to keep source compatibility. Of course, IBM's uncharacteristic openness for the PC architecture and Apple's newly-closed Macintosh architecture certainly also had somewhat to do with the results.

Having programmed, at the buttembly level, on IBM 360's, PDP-8's, various x86 chips, various 680x0 chips and some really weird things, I would rather 680x0 than x86, but ...