On Sun, May 9, 2021 at 3:58 PM Larry McVoy &lt;lm(a)mcvoy.com&gt; wrote: He did. It was about the size and form factor of the Compaq 'luggable.' IIRC hBill used a flavor of the multibus, which made a large power supply and more expensive peripherals (although Sun, Masscomp, and Apollo were also using Multibus in those days -- as Multibus was cheaper than the Unibus or QBUS). Bill's computer showed up at about the same times as the Sun-2, which was 68010 based. As Yale Pratt once said of the NS32016 ISA, 'it was a VAX/780 cleaned up but on a single chip'. Still technically a CISC, but did had fewer specialty features (more like PDP-10 in that what Bill Wulf used to call a 'regular and complete' architecture). Conceptually the ISA more powerful than the 68000 ISA, but it lacked a good compiler (*a.k.a.* 'production quality' compiler) that could exploit it, and as you point out, Nat Semi had a difficult time producing them. Funny, the compiler issue was SOP for the chip folks in those times as they had traditionally relied on 3rd parties to build the compiler for them - they would put out an assembler (usually written in Fortran-IV), make the assembler 'open source' and let the ecosystem go from there. Compiler houses (such as Green Hills, MCA, Frieberghouse, and PG) had to decide if they wanted to invest in that new ISA or not if they could not get someone else to pay them to write one for it. The systems folks (like DEC/DG knew that was not good enough). Sun was just awakening to that fact and I >>think<< it would have been around then that they started their real compiler team (Rob G -- you probably know more than I do here). Anyway, I always felt it was the compiler that killed them as much as Nat Semi's well-known Si production issues. Also, so many of us were ignoring the PC because it was based on the x86, that we did not realize that the PC's ISA bus was 'good enough (Masscomp never built anything with it, and Apollos did not until they finally did the DN3000 a couple of years later and I think it was not until RR that Sun tried). But in the end, the 386 'won' for economic reasons -- by being on the PC ecosystem much cheaper peripherals snd eventually got the ability to solve the addressing issues so you could run large programs on it, so the fact that it had the worst ISA did not matter. I've always wondered if a Nat Semi NS32016 based system running in a PC/AT form factor had appeared that was priced like a PC/AT if that might have had a chance. Clem ᐧ ᐧ ᐧ