21 Jan
2020
21 Jan
'20
12:09 a.m.
On Jan 20, 2020, at 10:04 AM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)mcvoy.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jan 20, 2020 at 12:19:25PM -0500, Clem Cole wrote:
My memory as well. A friend and I got ahold of the complete set of chips
and started to build out the hardware for a Unix box. We got most of the
way there too, and then the odd quirks started showing up. We tracked
some of them to our layout and the others to the NS chips. Then we gave
it up as a “ah, it would have been nice if only” project.
David
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.