Subject: Re: Slightly Off-Topic...
To: Greg A. Woods <woods@weird.com>
From: Dave McGuire <mcguire@neurotica.com>
List: port-vax
Date: 06/25/2001 15:10:43
On June 25, Greg A. Woods wrote:
> >   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...  :-)

  *poke* ;)

> >   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 !  ;-)

  Really?  I never really looked at them in that way.  Perhaps I shall
have to revisit them. :)

  Are there any decent machines around built with those procs?

> >   ...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....  :-)

  The 6502/1802/8085 are what I was talking about.

      -Dave Mcguire