[TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")

[Greg A. Woods]

At Mon, 20 Jan 2020 10:04:32 -0800, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")
> 
> I know those Nat Semi chips very well, or did at the time.  I so wanted to
> love those chips, the instruction set felt like whoever did the PDP-11
> did the 320xx chips.  But they couldn't produce chips without bugs and
> that killed them.  It's a crying shame, I liked the instruction set
> WAY better than the VAX.  The VAX seemed really messing compared to 
> the PDP-11, the 320xx chips seemed clean.  Might be rose colored 
> glasses but that's my memory.

I held a lot of anticipation for the NS chips as well, and I remember
well excitedly going around to trade shows for a year or two and playing
around with the very few Unix systems based on them that showed up on
occasion.

From what I understand it was really only the original NS32016 that was
too buggy to be trusted.  The NS32032 was a bug-fix release that also
came a full 32-bit external bus, and the NS32532 a while later was quite
a contender at the time in terms of performance (wikipedia says "about
twice as performant as the competing MC68030 and i80386").

In the end though I discovered the ATT 3b2 systems and their also quite
nicely orthogonal WE32000 CPUs (though in the end I never did write more
than a very simple demo program in assembler, just to know I could).  My
copy of the WE32100 Information Manual sits right beside my VAX
Instruction Reference Manual.  Sadly the 3B2s I had were never as
powerful as a PC532 was though -- more like the sluggish i386 and m68k
systems of the day.

-- 
					Greg A. Woods <gwoods at acm.org>

Kelowna, BC     +1 250 762-7675           RoboHack <woods at robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods at planix.com>     Avoncote Farms <woods at avoncote.ca>
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