The Chloe 280SE, a New Z80 Microcomputer
Is this a 16 bit or an 8 bit machine?  It&#x27;s &quot;taking Z80 users into the 16-bit era&quot; but it uses a Z80A, so?<p>A common fantasy trope amongst grey beards is to speculate how Commodore&#x2F;Tandy&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;Atari&#x2F;X could have beaten the IBM PC and its clones.<p>IMO IBM &amp; clones had 4 big advantages:<p>- the IBM name<p>- Lotus 1-2-3<p>- backwards compatibility<p>- open architecture, the clone army<p>Only the first couldn&#x27;t be had by others, but they had a big offsetting advantage: a huge base of existing software.   But they all threw it away when coming out with their 16 or 32 bit successors to their 8 bitters.<p>They didn&#x27;t really have a choice, there weren&#x27;t any CPU&#x27;s they could use.   The Z8000 wasn&#x27;t backwards compatible and the 65c816 didn&#x27;t come out until 1983.<p>But what if the 65c816 (or a similar chip) came out in 1979 or the z8000 was backwards compatible, and then the big 8 bit companies came out with backwards compatible architectures which were successfully cloned like the Laser 128?<p>Or to put it another way, what if a IIGS like machine was available for all the 8 bit architectures, and in 1980 or so rather than 1986 after IBM had already won?