[TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode

[Larry McVoy]

On Wed, Feb 03, 2021 at 08:10:58PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote:
> On 2/3/2021 7:41 PM, John Gilmore wrote:
> >When the 68000 was announced, it was obviously head-and-shoulders better
> >than the other clunky 8-bit and 16-bit systems, with a clean 32-bit
> >architecture and a large address space.
> The 68K always reminded me of the VAX.

I'm not sure if that is a compliment or not.

The NS320XX always reminded me more of the PDP-11 (which is by *far*
my favorite assembler, so uniform, I had a TA that could read the octal
dump of a PDP-11 like it was C).  I wasn't that good but I could sort of
see what he was seeing and I never saw that in the VAX.  68K was closer
but I felt like the NS320xx was closer yet.  Pity they couldn't produce
bug free chips.

Someone mentioned Z80000, I stopped at Z80 so I don't know if that was
also a pleasant ISA.

The x86 stuff is about as far away from PDP-11 as you can get.  Required
to know it, but so unpleasant.

I have to admit that I haven't looked at ARM assembler, the M1 is making
me rethink that.  Anyone have an opinion on where ARM lies in the pleasant
to unpleasant scale?

--lm who misses comp.arch back when CPU people hung out there