" What is going to happen
is that they will gradually take over from the 80x86 line. They will
run old MS-DOS programs by interpreting the 80386 in software. (I even
wrote my own IBM PC simulator in C, which you can get by FTP from
ftp.cs.vu.nl = 192.31.231.42 in dir minix/simulator.) I think it is a
gross error to design an OS for any specific architecture, since that is
not going to be around all that long. "
Shocking how wrong he ended up being about the x86 line. It makes me wonder what predictions we make today will come out to.
Honestly, this isn't all that far off -- modern Intel and AMD chips have essentially nothing in common with the old 8086 line, and in fact use microcode heavily to "emulate" the classic instruction set.
Of course, it took them a few years longer than he thought to get there, but the basic idea is sound.
Shocking how wrong he ended up being about the x86 line. It makes me wonder what predictions we make today will come out to.