Anon (no.delete@this.spam.com) on January 15, 2020 6:04 pm wrote:
> Ricardo B (ricardo.b.delete@this.xxxxx.xx) on January 15, 2020 5:46 pm wrote:
> > At that point several companies were selling 8-bit CPUs.
> > And the fact that most of them met the dustbin of history tells us it's not a trivial undertaking.
> >
> > Your assumption that IBM could just come down and design a family of low cost chips that could be
> > manufactured at cost and price parity with the off the shelf competition has nothing to stand.
>
> It's not like IBM never designed a successful computer...
>
> > But the point is that MOS didn't decide to make the 6501 out of
> > thin air, they were targeting the same market as the 6800.
>
> 6502 targeted a new market.
>
> > It never got much use in personal computers but it got used in others things
> > such as arcade cabinets which were an established market at the time.
>
> I searched for but didn't find the units sold for each, it look likes
> 6800 got just 1% of 6502 sales, but I have no actual data to show.
>
> That's my point, there were a market for minicomputers, terminals, etc, but a high margin,
> low volume market, 6502 was successful because MOS believed in a new lower margin but much
> higher volume market, they hadn't enough confirmed customers before announcing a $25 chip.
>
> At that time IBM were selling minis for $20k with in-house processors, they
> just didn't believe a $1000 computer would have enough volume to be worth.

The 6502 went to sell a lot more than the 6800 as it was cheaper and then entered a virtuous cycle of higher volume and lower prices.

But that is not the point.
The point is what kind of bet did MOS made in those years around 1975.
Almost certainly MOS has a business plan where the 6502 would be profitable at much lower volumes that those it would eventually achieve.
There's no indication that immediately after launch MOS was producing the 6502 in huge numbers needed to achieve extremely low production cost and selling them at marginal prices.

And that's the bet IBM would have to make.
Not only to develop a chip that could be made at low cost but to make in advance a large financial bet in high volume production and low margins on the hopes that their new personal computer product would eventually sell enough to recoup all of this.

And that was a bet IBM was almost assured to lose.
Because if the IBM PC hadn't been cloned against IBM's wishes, we would not be having this conversation.
The IBM PC would have ended up history as yet another case of where a large established player failed to grasp the future.
And we'd be using some other family of personal computers spurred by some other company using a commercially available CPUs and other chips, most likely from intel or Motorola.