HP stuff (was HP's not cool)

"Jay West" <west(a)tseinc.com> wrote: You certainly didn't have to remove memory cards from a PDP-8 to add I/O cards. Or, for that matter, from the PDP-4, PDP-5, PDP-7, and PDP-9, which I also claim to be the intellectual forebears of the HP 21xx. Where on earth did you get that idea? In terms of the instruction-set architecture, it clearly was derived Whether the machine was microprogrammed, had writable control store, or had variable-length cycle times, have nothing to do with whether the instruction set architecture is a clone of the DEC architecture. None of these ideas were original with either DEC or HP. All of those ideas were used in various DEC machines, although none of the 12-bitters were microcoded. I didn't say that there was anything WRONG with cloning DEC architecture, or that HP didn't innovate around the edges of it. Why invent something completely new and different, when you can copy and tweak existing successful designs? There's nothing wrong or sinister about that. When you buy this year's automobile, it is full of features and designs copied from hundreds of past models of automobiles from many different manufacturers. The 2100A/S added more bells and whistles to the original 2116 design, and the 21MX machines add yet more. But that doesn't in any way make the 21xx instruction set architecture any less of a decendent of the DEC machines. And it's not surprising, since HP used a lot of PDP-8s before they decided to get into the computer business themselves. As is usual around here, (e.g., the flame war over the word "obsolete"), people seem to associate way to much emotional baggage with simple terms and phrases.