On Tue, 26 Jun 2001, Matt London wrote:
> 
>   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

zilog got swept way under, but theyre still around. You still see zilog 
stuff in phones and such sometimes, theyre still a player in the embedded 
market. 

> 
>   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 :&)

:) MIPS is ok for learning (my first asm were z80 and 8086, and i think 
the z80 is th ebest to start on :), and MIPS is a really elegant minimalistic
design, but you have to see the beauty of the VAX, and then there's no 
going back.. :) you can actually write useful two-instruction programs :)

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

mostly hype imho. its another core with x86 emulation wrapped around it. 
big deal, AMD and pals have been doing it for years. So you can use the 
native set too? ok, minor cheer. still, big deal. The secrecy was part of 
the hype, and very well-executed to make everybody look when they finally 
said something. a few jumped on during the hype and committed to it, sony 
mainly. i dont think that its anythign special. 

happy hacking,
Isildur