From: "Greg A. Woods" <woods@robohack.ca>
To: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")
Date: Tue, 21 Jan 2020 16:14:00 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <m1iu3ei-0036tPC@more.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200120180432.GJ28686@mcvoy.com>
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At Mon, 20 Jan 2020 10:04:32 -0800, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question")
>
> 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.
I held a lot of anticipation for the NS chips as well, and I remember
well excitedly going around to trade shows for a year or two and playing
around with the very few Unix systems based on them that showed up on
occasion.
From what I understand it was really only the original NS32016 that was
too buggy to be trusted. The NS32032 was a bug-fix release that also
came a full 32-bit external bus, and the NS32532 a while later was quite
a contender at the time in terms of performance (wikipedia says "about
twice as performant as the competing MC68030 and i80386").
In the end though I discovered the ATT 3b2 systems and their also quite
nicely orthogonal WE32000 CPUs (though in the end I never did write more
than a very simple demo program in assembler, just to know I could). My
copy of the WE32100 Information Manual sits right beside my VAX
Instruction Reference Manual. Sadly the 3B2s I had were never as
powerful as a PC532 was though -- more like the sluggish i386 and m68k
systems of the day.
--
Greg A. Woods <gwoods@acm.org>
Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods@avoncote.ca>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2020-01-22 0:14 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 54+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2020-01-17 16:01 [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 16:53 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-17 17:08 ` Arrigo Triulzi
2020-01-17 17:25 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-17 19:59 ` Arno Griffioen
2020-01-18 3:50 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-18 4:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-18 15:25 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-18 16:19 ` reed
2020-01-19 2:49 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 3:12 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:47 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Warren Toomey
2020-01-19 3:51 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 3:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2020-01-19 13:25 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-19 13:48 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 3:32 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-20 3:51 ` George Michaelson
2020-01-20 3:59 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Jon Forrest
2020-01-20 17:19 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 17:49 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-20 19:00 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 18:04 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-20 18:09 ` David Barto
2020-01-20 18:34 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Arthur Krewat
2020-01-20 19:18 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Clem Cole
2020-01-20 19:46 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-20 20:15 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 6:58 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD Lars Brinkhoff
2020-01-21 14:30 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 17:17 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 17:22 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 17:25 ` Jon Steinhart
2020-01-21 18:43 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 18:44 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-21 19:14 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 20:27 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-22 0:14 ` Greg A. Woods [this message]
2020-01-21 0:44 ` [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Bakul Shah
2020-01-20 19:09 ` Theodore Y. Ts'o
2020-01-20 19:51 ` Clem Cole
2020-01-20 23:04 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-21 0:13 ` Warner Losh
2020-01-21 23:45 ` Greg A. Woods
2020-01-18 15:30 ` [TUHS] On the origins of Linux - "an academic question" Larry McVoy
2020-01-17 23:11 ` Andrew Warkentin
2020-01-17 23:20 ` Rob Pike
2020-01-17 23:38 ` Brantley Coile
2020-01-18 0:23 ` Wesley Parish
2020-01-18 15:35 [TUHS] Early Linux and BSD (was: On the origins of Linux - "an academic question") Jason Stevens
2020-01-18 15:49 ` Larry McVoy
2020-01-19 14:17 Noel Chiappa
2020-01-19 20:49 ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-01-19 16:05 Noel Chiappa
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