Hi,
  Now then, just a handful of things that've crossed my mind reading this
thread :&)

  What ever happened to Zilog - I cut my teeth on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum
(I believe also marketed as a Timex 2000?) and a TRS-80 model 1 - both Z80
based machines

  MIPS seems very nice - never had a MIPS box myself, but we covered MIPS
asm in our 1st year Computer Systems Architecture module (I'm sad to say
they dropped it this year, so we're the last year to have done it). It
seems very clean, elegant and generally nice to use. We had to hand
compile C code to MIPS asm as one of the exam questions - a nice easy 20
marks :&)

  It's such a shame to see the diversity of the processor market vanish,
it took me far too long to get some non-x86 boxen, and there's a lot to be
said in favour of them.

  What about Transmeta's beasty - what do we think of that?

 -- Matt

---
E-mail:
  matt@pkl.net, matt@knm.yi.org, matt@printf.net
  matt@m-techdiagnostics.ltd.uk, matthew.london@stud.umist.ac.uk
  mattl@vcd.student.utwente.nl, mlondon@mail.talk-101.com
Web Page:
  http://knm.yi.org/
  http://pkl.net/~matt/

PGP Key fingerprint = 00BF 19FE D5F5 8EAD 2FD5  D102 260E 8BA7 EEE4 8D7F
PGP Key http://knm.yi.org/matt-pgp.html