[TUHS] Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[John Levine]

According to Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org>:
>On Fri, 5 Jul 2024, Peter Yardley wrote:
>
>> The DG Nova had a pretty nice architecture. 2 accumulators, 2 index 
>> registers, program counter, status register. No stack register tho. 
>> There was a micro processor version by Fairchild.
>
>The story behind it is interesting too.  The designer at DEC (Ed de 
>Castro) tried to promote it, Ken Olson didn't like it, so he left to form 
>Data General and created the DG Nova.

That's the folklore but the reality is somewhat more nuanced than that.

He was working on PDP-X, a 16 bit word addressed line of machines in
the style of the PDP-8 and -9:

https://bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/pdp-x/29_Nov67.pdf

When management decided to build the PDP-11, de Castro did indeed quit
and started DG, but the Nova was quite different from the PDP-X. It
was a clever design that used new MSI chips so the processor fit on
one board and was, I assume, pretty cheap to build.
-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
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