anyone read dealers of lightning?

Brent Hilpert wrote: Interesting question, but a difficult one to answer. Both Eagle (MV) and VAX architectures had good and bad implementations, with (from an ISA standpoint) the VAX being decidedly the more CISC-ish of the two (the Eagle retaining a lot of the RISC-ish flavor of the original Nova and then Eclipse families). Somewhat to its detriment the Eagle retained the horrible Nova I/O bus (although in some cases several distinct instances of it), but eventually compensated by hanging relatively intelligent devices off of it. In the end targeting *nix to the Eagle was problematic because of the way that byte pointers work (or don't) relative to what was expected by C, making implementation of the language a great deal more difficult. It was eventually done, but it was decidedly a later arrival in the marketplace. I suspect a better apples-to-apples comparison might be the theoretical porting of Multics to each architecture. There, that should put the fox in with the chickens ;) -- Chris Kennedy chris at mainecoon.com AF6AP http://www.mainecoon.com PGP KeyID 108DAB97 PGP fingerprint: 4E99 10B6 7253 B048 6685 6CBC 55E1 20A3 108D AB97 "Mr. McKittrick, after careful consideration..."