According to Dave Bradley, one of the creators of the IBM PC, "We chose the 8088 [over the 8086] because of its 8-bit data bus. The smaller bus saved money in the areas of RAM, ROM, and logic for the simple system."
Another thing is that even if almost nobody bought the minimal RAM configuration, having a low-cost configuration can be very important from a marketing standpoint. (By the way, it's kind of amazing that the base RAM for an IBM PC was just 16 kilobytes, and now 16 gigabytes is a base RAM configuration.)
Another thing is that even if almost nobody bought the minimal RAM configuration, having a low-cost configuration can be very important from a marketing standpoint. (By the way, it's kind of amazing that the base RAM for an IBM PC was just 16 kilobytes, and now 16 gigabytes is a base RAM configuration.)
https://www.tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/199...