8 Jul
2024
8 Jul
'24
2:21 a.m.
According to Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org>:
On Fri, 5 Jul 2024, Peter Yardley wrote:
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(a)taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for
Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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.