Nat Semi ns32k, was Re: Whitechapel Computer Works MG-1

My (dim) recollection of the NS32K architecture (I recall someone came to MIT and gave a presentation on it, and I have an early architecture document - so old that it's called the NS16K!) was that it was very elegant, but my sense now, looking back, was that it was one of that wave of machines (the VAX being the other notable one) that went down the CISC road just before RISC arrived, and showed that CISC was not really the way to go; those systems were all dinosaurs. Which, in the NS16K/NS32K's case was unfortunate, because the architecture in other ways, i.e. at a high level (i.e. ignoring the instructions), was the best of the whole lot. Notably, it attempted to provide real segmentation support, perhaps the only chip of that group to do so. Although of course once Unix took over the world, that was irrelevant. (Much as I dearly love(d) V6 for how it got an incredible amount of power out of a very small machine, it's pretty clear that the basic approach of Unix was inferior to that of the single level store systems [e.g. Multics]; Unix really was - and in many ways remains - a toy operating system, considered Noel