21 Jan
2020
21 Jan
'20
12:04 a.m.
On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:19:25PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 10:52 PM George Michaelson
<ggm(a)algebras.org> wrote:
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.
It does me no credit, that I initially reacted
very badly to 386BSD,
and the initial {Net,Free,Open} situation.
First, be careful. What we sometimes call 386BSD as a 'release'
started
just as a port of NET2 to the 386 based 'commodity' hardware platform. The
history is that in the late 1970s/early 80s Bill Jolitz was working for Nat
Semi and ported BSD 4.1, to a multibus based NS16032 board that NS had
built, which was similar to the Stanford University Network (SUN) terminal
what had a 68000. He eventually built a 'luggable' using that and updated
to the port to 4.2++. He (and Lynn I believe) started a company to sell
that hardware/software solution and for whatever reason, it did not really
take off.