On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:42 PM John Gilmore <gnu@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@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@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.