28 Oct
2010
28 Oct
'10
10:51 a.m.
On 28 Oct 2010 at 13:20, William Donzelli wrote:
I was initially thinking about just the hardware
architecture when the
machines were being designed, not the software aspect, nor what the
machines did (or influenced) after they were released. The
aforementioned memory mapped I/O, for example.
Not to be too much of a wet blanket, but how many of those DEC-unique
innovations (even if you manage to assert that they originated with
DEC) persist in today's hardware? Do modern PCs use memory-mapped
I/O? The 68K, but for some Freescale relics, is history.
Major innovations, such as virtual memory and orthogonal instruction
sets and hardware-implemented stacks preceded the PDP-11.
Perhaps the major contribution of the PDP-11 and VAX was that they
were comparatively cheap for the processing power.
--Chuck