On or about 10:53 PM 12/29/98 -0500, Allison J Parent was caught in a dark alley speaking these words: If that's true, I'd really like a PDP-11! ;-) Compared to what? Clock per clock, it was the fastest thing for quite a long time. And remember, the 6809 was *not* the fastest of the fast 8-bitters... ever heard of a *6309*??? Pretty rare critter there! Made by Hitachi as an OEM to Motorola, CMOS, 3MHz (most overclockable to 4MHz) and would kick a '286 in the backside easier than anything 8-bit (with 6309 hand-optimized code) -- it did have twice the registers of the 6809 and had -- no typo here -- 32 bit math capabilities. I did it. Admittedly, it wasn't *purely* apples to apples comparison, but I took totally portable M$Basic programs doing integer & real math, and integer, real & string sorting, and ran them in RS-DOS on a CoCo2 and in Basic & BasicA on a True-Blue Bummer/AT '286-10. At .89 Mhz, the 6809 was roughly .7x in everything except integer-related items - remember, RS-DOS doesn't have integers... everything's a five-byte real. Tweak the CoCo2 to 1.78 Mhz (mine ran stable at that speed), and the CoCo bettered the AT by just under 10%. Just for shits&grins, I *really* optimized the code for Basic09 and booted OS-9. Even at .89MHz, the CoCo won, by a decent margin... but this part is moot; just included for hystericals. Oh, and both proggies had *minimal* output - video was faster on my CoCo, you know - didn't want to take undue advantage of that IBM. ;-) How, tho. compiled C to compiled C? Sure. But how about optimized assembly vs. optimized assembly? IIRC, most (if not all) instructions execute in fewer clock cycles on the 6809. But also, the addressing capabilities of the 6809 far outweigh anything 86ish - I've tried learning x86 assembly - I ran screaming into the night... took my wife a week to find me! Any assy. job I've ever seen can be done in a *lot* fewer instructions on a 6809 than an x86. In my book, faster _and_ fewer gives a pretty decent improvement - sure, a couple loops would run faster on a '286, but a regular proggie is more than just counting loops, and all of the branching & indexing capabilities of the 6809 really improve the odds. As were most _inexpensive home machines_ of the time. I have a "podified" Atari 800 (2 disk drives, small printer, etc.), I've seen many "podified" Commie 64's & such... I really don't think the business machines from RS/Tandy were any more "grafted" than the IBM tho. The IBM was *not* slated as a home machine. It was a business machine, and I will agree totally that pods and wires (at the time) would never be seen as a businesslike machine.... but today... (I have more cables coming from my Pentium then I *ever* had out of my CoCo3 - and yet it seems only *marginally* more useful.) IMHO, a <$1000 loaded home machine is *not* supposed to outperform a >$4000 business machine. Oh, and Ward could prolly answer this: Was there a version of Xenix available for an IBM / Clone? I know there was one for the Tandy 2000, but that's the only version I've ever seen. How far did M$'s licensing go with that OS? In closing, anyone ever played Rogue on both the CoCo (OS-9) and the IBM version? 40K code for the CoCo, ~140K code on the IBM, on respective machines the CoCo version was much faster (except booting - floppy vs. hard drive is no comparison) and - well - the IBM version sucked. Weren't as many features, despite the code bloat. Oh, and if anyone wants my custom font for playing Rogue on the CoCo (stairs look like stairs, scrolls look like scrolls, etc.) lemme know - I'll spark up the CoCo slide the font file over to the emulator, so I can put it on the Web sometime. Requires 512K. So... Did I fill 1999's quota for drivel yet??? ;-) See ya, and happy new year, Roger "Merch" Merchberger ===== Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- zmerch(a)30below.com SysAdmin - Iceberg Computers ===== Merch's Wild Wisdom of the Moment: ===== for (1..15) { print "Merry Christmas\n"; } (from perl.1 man page, version 4.)