22 Jan
2020
22 Jan
'20
6:14 a.m.
At Mon, 20 Jan 2020 10:04:32 -0800, Larry McVoy <lm(a)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(a)acm.org>
Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>