On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 7:42 PM John Gilmore 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 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 wrote: > -- Dave, wondering whether anyone has ever used every VAX instruction > AFAIU, some of them were significantly slower than their multi-instruction equivalents.