> On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, John Levon wrote:
> > > On Wed, 8 Jul 1998, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> > >
> > > > Worse that that. If you buy any Intel processor since the 8086, US$5.00
> > > > of the cost is a license fee paid to Micro$haft. Micro$haft claims
> > > > ownership to the "Intel Architecture", i.e., what used to be called
> > > > the "IBM-PC/AT". They "purchased" the rights to this design from IBM
> > > > sometime in the early '70s, waited about 10 years for major developments
> > > > to be made by Intel and others, then threatened a suit. The settlement
> > > > was a 5.00 per processor fee to be paid by the end-user.
>
> > Will this also appy directly or indirectly to chips bought in the UK ? I
> > swore I wouldn't give them any money ever.
>
> An 8086 costs the equivalent of USD 7, including 22% sales
> tax, in the local electronics shop here. If Bill G gets 5
> dollars, and 1.30 goes to the tax man, that would leave 70
> cents...
>
> How could Microsoft acquire the rights to something that
> didn't even exist in the early '70s? The 8086 itself is a late
> '70s chip, and the IBM-PC (the original, not the AT, which
> came later) must have come after that.
>
> Johan Myreen
> jem@iki.fi
Don't kill the messinger! I just repeated what was repeated to me.
Futher, since we use the "Microsoft-Intel" architecture on machines
that we make, and we don't use Microsoft-anything on the machines,
we should not have to purchase a license to use such stuff. I am
assurred that we do purchase such a license as part of the CPU
cost --even though we don't use MicroGarbage.
The Operating System is not Linux either. It's called ARTOS
"Analogic Realtime Operating System". It handles, continuously,
8,700 interrupts-per-second (gawd). The context-switch rate is
about 2048 switches/second although it is dynamic to handle bursts
of activity.
Cheers,
Dick Johnson
***** FILE SYSTEM MODIFIED *****
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Warning : It's hard to remain at the trailing edge of technology.
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