[TUHS] 68k prototypes & microcode

[John Cowan]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:42 PM John Gilmore <gnu at toad.com> wrote:


> It seems like the designers of
> the other chips (e.g. the 8088) had never actually worked with real
> computers (mainframes and minicomputers) and kept not-learning from
> computing history.
>

Hence the description of Windows 95 as "a 32-bit extension to a 16-bit
patch to an 8 bit OS originally for a 4-bit chip written by a 2-bit company
that doesn't care 1 bit about its users."



On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 8:34 PM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

The NS320XX always reminded me more of the PDP-11 (which is by *far*
> my favorite assembler, so uniform,


I slightly prefer the MIPS-32.


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

Required?  Ghu forbid.  After doing a bunch of PDP-11 assembler work, I
found out that the Vax had 256 opcodes and foreswore assembly thereafter.
Still, that was nothing compared to the 1500+ opcodes of x86*.  I think I
dodged a bullet.


On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 9:18 PM Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:


> -- Dave, wondering whether anyone has ever used every VAX instruction
>

AFAIU, some of them were significantly slower than their multi-instruction
equivalents.
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