[ On Monday, June 25, 2001 at 13:40:52 (-0400), Dave McGuire wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: Slightly Off-Topic...
>
>   Good lord, the 6502?  I actually like to have some REGISTERS in my
> processors, thank you. ;)

What do you mean?  Thera are 256 ready to use!  (They just happen to
reside in RAM...  :-)

>   Yes, but those were some WEIRD designs.

What do you mean, exactly?  The WE32000 almost *is* a VAX (done right ;-)!

The NS16032 and NS32032 are very much like a VAX too, at least
architecturally.  The NS guys claimed a much tighter instruction set,
and their MMU is probably better in sime respects....  They certainly
seemed to run faster than a MicroVAX at the same clock speed !  ;-)

> > Of course they all paid homage back to the VAX....
> 
>   ...which is newer than most of the processors that we discussed
> above, strangely enough.

Well, as far as I know the VAX is not not newer than the WE32000, and
it's definitely newer than the NS16000 (1983).  The first VAXen shipped
in 1978.  The 4004, 6502, 1802, and 8085 are the only ones mentioned so
far that are older, and they're all less than 16 bits so not even
vaguely on-topic for unix types....  :-)

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods@acm.org>     <woods@robohack.ca>
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