At Mon, 20 Jan 2020 10:04:32 -0800, Larry McVoy 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 Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack Planix, Inc. Avoncote Farms