Happy Birthday VAX 11/780 (influence of)

On 10/26/2010 11:55 PM, William Donzelli wrote: In this case I think popularity is important. The '11 instruction set was somewhat of a departure from other machines in that it was very "programmer friendly". That, coupled with the fact that it was very popular in universities led to a lot of people embracing it. The VAX was widely adopted in universities and at one point it could have almost been said that many people considered "all the worlds a VAX" since they were so popular. DEC was an alternative to IBM at the time; more accessible and more oriented toward individual scientific users. (I don't know about you, but the 370 operators always got tense when I touched the console, but I would twist the power keys on most of the '11s and VAXes I used and I was alone in the room, and it was *much* quieter :-) You could insert a small paragraph here about the role of unix and how unix and the pdp-11 and vax interacted. And then how the 680xx accelerated that vector. It might be interesting to review how microcode (and nanocode) affected all three of those designs. Both machines have been left in the dust by RISC architectures, mostly because of the notion that it's easier to accelerate (parallelize if you will) MIPS style RISC instruction sets. Even Intel turns ciscy X86 code into something which looks remarkably like MIPS code inside their chips. Having said that, I would claim the '11 and VAX taught us that "going more CISC" was helpful but was ultimately doomed due to speed issues. Much was learned from those architectures. -brad