4 Feb
2021
4 Feb
'21
8:56 p.m.
On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:42 PM John Gilmore <gnu(a)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(a)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(a)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.