Software Developers Stear Clear of IBM AT
from the July 15, 1985 issue of ComputerWorld magazine
by Edward Warner
Although the IBM Personal Computer AT was greeted by the cheers of corporate users craving speed for their spreadsheets, the machine holds other potential, particularly the ability to run programs in up to 16M bytes of random-access memory (RAM).
That potential remains largely untapped, and the situation may not change anytime soon because many important software firms have held off on developing packages specifically for the AT.
According to developers, the lion’s share of the problem stems from the AT’s operating system, IBM’s PC-DOS 3.1, which will not work in the AT’s protected address mode, the machine’s gateway to what can become up to 16M bytes of RAM.
PC-DOS is limited to addressing directly no more than 640K bytes of RAM. In addition, according to consultant Alan Finger, president of Cytek, Inc. of Andover, Mass., PC-DOS “takes advantage of nothing in the [Intel Corp. 80286]” chip on which the AT is based, including the ability to support multitasking and multiuser operation at the chip level.
Developers could still write PC-DOS applications that use the protected address mode, but the applications would run so sluggishly on the AT that they would be useless, said Mike Loftus, systems software marketing manager for Digital Research, Inc. The sluggishness, he elaborated, would arise because “the [PC-DOS] calls would have to be handled by an exception handler” that would spend considerable time routing calls to the proper location.
Developers who write applications that run slowly on the AT but address its larger memory would encounter an additional problem. The AT, in their view, is not selling well enough to warrant going out on such a limb.
IBM, as always, is releasing no sales figures, but analyst George Colony, president of Forrester Research, Inc., estimates that between 200,000 and 230,000 ATs will be sold this year. Colony, however, predicts that all Personal Computers to come out of IBM in the next year will use the Intel chip.
Until that actually happens, Richard Rabins, president of Alpha Software Corp., said he believes it “could be dangerous” for developers to write programs that only run on the AT. At Bellevue, Wash.-based Microrim, Inc., President Wayne Erickson agreed, saying, “We really try to avoid things that, from a hardware standpoint, limit our market.”
Neither Microrim, the developer of the Rbase 5000 data base management package, nor Alpha Software Corp., publisher of the Electric Desk integrated package, nor Forefront Corp., author of Ashton-Tate’s Framework integrated package, are doing development work for the AT-class machines, the companies said.
That could all change, however, with the release of a new version of PC-DOS, expected to be called Version 4, or with the arrival of Digital Research, Inc.’s (DRI) forthcoming Concurrent DOS-286 operating system. Both operating systems reportedly will debut in the next 12 months and are expected to support the additional addressable memory on the AT in addition to such functions as multitasking, according to DRI’s Loftus.
Concurrent DOS-286, he said, will let users run PC-DOS applications in the AT’s protected mode. Concurrent DOS-286 will ship to OEMs, such as AT-compatible makers and software developers, in the fourth quarter. Microsoft, meanwhile declined comment on any products it might have under development.
Were the 640K-barrier to fall and high-memory, high-speed applications to become possible, developers might begin using such memory-hungry technologies as artificial intelligence, according to Robert Firmin, president of Javelin Software; Corp. Such AI-based software, the Cambridge, Mass., software developer said, could include expert systems and a new generation of easy-to-use software that adjusts to the skill level of the user.
For an idea of what that future would be like, consultant Finger suggested that one “picture [Lotus Development Corp.’s] 1-2-3 with IG byte of address space [in virtual memory].”