although I don't remember the Z-80 being a clone of the 8085 CPU like the author of that site claims. (or has my memory gone faulty?)

Bob, I have no idea who this person is, and unfortunately I've forgotten what page(s) I followed to get there. -If you snip out all but the domain name from the URL I posted, it seems that _that_ might be your very guy. (Try navigating through the/his "Hobbies" link onto the computer museum, and decide for yourself.. -It's at the bottom of that "Hobbies" page..) - - - Front page updated little over a year ago, so, further inquiries doesn't seem all that impossible, if anyone should be so inclined. 2007/5/15, Bob Bradlee <caveguy at sbcglobal.net>:

Quoting Bob Bradlee <caveguy at sbcglobal.net>: list expected in function dolist : pcist called from user defined function DoMtype doe it not like Firefox?

OOPS .... MY Bad ! http://ygams.com/ygams.lsp?Switchtech is fixed now. I had rolled back some changes I made today, I was in a hurry and forgot to restore one of the include files that I had also changed. Function DoMtype's parameters had been changed from a list to a string between versions, thus the error message you were seeing. It looked and worked just fine here, untill I cleared my cookies, and then it blew it's cookies just like it did for every one new to the site. Bob On Wed, 16 May 2007 02:05:30 +0200, from at fu3.org wrote:

On Wed, 16 May 2007 04:53:24 +0200, from at fu3.org wrote: "Based on", WoW that is a wide subject .... This project started out as a utility lookup.lsp I wrote some time back as a personal tool, it took a search string and feed it to a handful of search engines, and compiled the returns into a single tiny page I could look at on my cell phone. I used it to lookup the current "usage" of domain and product names as well as a prefetch search tool. The project took a turn in march when I decided to modify it to attempt to figure out the overall size of the known or at least indexed world of the internet. It been slowly evolving over time unideal early april when using lookup7 I discovered that the the 5 search engines I chose to track and use as my reference sources could be spell out YGAMS on my cell phone screen and YGAMS.COM had not only not been registered. The best part was that it had a "gamy" (the proposed name at the time) value of 0. Other than a few misspellings of YGAMES YGAMS had an internet present of Zip, nada, Zero... Too cool to pass up, so lookup.lsp got a face lift and YGAMS.COM was born. A conversation with a math guy, confirmed my math was as good, and I began to calculate and log the daily average size of the indexed world. Using this overall average I built a weighting system, which I apply to the results of each search, to produce the current YGAMS number. At that point YGAMS was text only and ran mostly on my cell phone. Upon returning from my annual trip into tax hell, I addressed the problems of charting YGAMS related info to my cell phone. I decided to try a pure HTML approach based on tables, I liked the idea that it did not require the generation or display of any image or file other than the pure HTML being generated and returned directly from the evaluation of a control lists. http://ygams.com/ygams.lsp?info was the first chart I started with. Followed in a few days by http://ygams.com/ygams.lsp?scores when I figured out how to stack backgrounds in a table cell. Early May, I set up a caching system and began generating what I will call the game charts I am playing with now. Which raises your second question ... I can say the math and logic is all mine. Every YGAMS goes through the same analysis process and is scaled based the same normalization and based on what I like to think of as the normalized size of the internet today. The resulting number is not as important as the relationship of theindex indicators used as daily references to each other. I was supprised just how much Yahoo Google Ask, MSN, and Search.com search results changed from day to day as the spiders drop and reindex several billion of pages a day between them. It is still a work in progress ... Bob Bradlee

On 17 May 2007 at 5:27, Ensor wrote: You forgot the 432, which was very revolutionary in design and contemporaneous with the 8086. Which shows you how far dramatic innovation will get you. No apologist for Intel, I think that context is important here. At the time that the 8086 (and 8088) was deployed, there was already a large body of x80 software (CP/M, WordStar, SuperCalc, etc.) that were largely written in assembly. The problem with building a product around any processor is what one does for software. With software already available for x80 platforms, and Intel (and others) offering automated translation of x80 code to x86 (and it generally worked well), Intel offered an attractive alternative. Add to that the fact that existing x80 peripherals would work just fine with the new processor and you have a winning combination. Indeed, long after the debut of the IBM PC, there were PC products that were largely composed of automatically translated x80 code. I really was a booster for the 68K--and programmed for it. But no one ever represented that there was a simple and straightforward way to translate x80 assembly to 68K code, nor was it clear if it was going to be simple to use x80 peripherals with the 68K. Zilog had trotted out the Z8000 at about the same time, but it wasn't clear if they were all that serious. I really liked the NS16032 architecture, but National at the time had a reputation to pulling the the rug out from under developers (SC/MP, PACE) without notice and being overly optimistic about release dates (In my case, "real soon now" was about 2 years between the time I got the marketing spiel about the 16032 and when they actually started to be manufactured in quantity). So you saw a dichotomy--existing CP/M applications that were run on the Kaypros and Osbornes made it into the 8086 world. The 68K tended to host the result of whole new development efforts--including Unix ports. Sometimes it seems that around 1983-84, you couldn't throw a stick without hitting a company that was doing another Unix port for the 68K. I don't really blame the guys in Boca Raton for choosing the 8088. There was software for it, but you keep costs down with an 8-bit bus and use commonly-available peripheral chips. Had the the 68K been chosen (and it was a strong rumor, particularly after the IBM 68K- based lab computer was announced before the 5150), it might never have been as successful. Cheers, Chuck

Rumor has it that Chuck Guzis may have mentioned these words: [good info snippety] That's not a fair comparison, tho - a fair comparison would be "a simple and straightforward way to translate 6800/6809 assembly to 68K code". Intel certainly didn't provide a 6800->x86 translator, did they? ;-) It would've - because the reason the PC was successful despite it's technological inferiority was due to it's being rammed [Microsoft Vista Style(TM)] of every major corporation that had IBM "big iron." After they were installed in most offices, the trickle-down effect of needing to work at home, so you had to have a compatible machine at home. Had IBM "invented" the Mac & MacOS and used the same "marketing strategy," we wouldn't have to worry about hating Vista & Bill Gates would still only be a millionaire. It really wouldn't have made a lot of difference to me - I'd have just spent my years whining about OS-9's superiority to MacOS instead of OS-9's superiority to MS-DOS/Winders. ;-) Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in!

Hi, Starglider? :-)) TTFN - Pete.

Rumor has it that Jim Battle may have mentioned these words: Not completely; but I seem to be viewing this thread in a very different manner than others here, and that might be due to my skewed view of reality, as it were... ;-) My main point for that part of the thread is that making a source-code translator from different processor families that would be even "mostly successful" would be at least 1, probably 2 orders of magnitude more difficult, IMHO, and would probably have never existed, even if it were possible. Cross compilers or no, installed software base or no, the PC as a home or personal platform wasn't popular in the slightest until the PC attained "critical mass" in the business world and it started making sense to have a compatible platform at home... and IMHO, that wouldn't have happened if IBM hadn't forced all their bigger shops to migrate their desktop machines to PCs. When I was in college ('85 until I quit in '88), *it didn't pay* to own a PC. Most of my classes utilized either 1) time on the System/36, 2) time on a Heathkit 3400A trainer (with source assembled on an HP 64000 machine with a 6800 pod) or if you were in the robotics classes, in the Apple ][ lab. IMHO, The PC didn't become ubiquitous until the above happened, and IMHO, it doesn't matter what CPU it was based on.... IMHO. Very true, but what I'm saying is had IBM settled on the 68K, built the software base for it, and once it hit critical mass for reasons I stated above, it still would have become the dominant platform. Maybe not as quickly or completely, but it would've still happened... and had that happened without MicroSoft as "the only player in town" I think computing as a whole would be much farther ahead than it is now. This from a guy who's particularly big fan of their much older products. [[ Did I mention IMHO? ;-) ]] So who's gonna buy a wholly offtopic yet o-so-kewl new Amiga when they're out? ;-) Laterz, Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- SysAdmin, Iceberg Computers zmerch at 30below.com Hi! I am a .signature virus. Copy me into your .signature to join in!

On 5/17/07, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: It's one of the things that aided Infocom's success - their cost of writing a new game was limited to the development expense of writing the game itself. Since they had begun their company by writing a virtual machine (the "Z-Machine"), all they had to do to port their oeuvre was to write the new virtual machine for the new platform. When I worked at Software Productions, writing kids software that was published in Reader's Digest, we had the opposite problem - we were 100% involved in the platform. Adding a new machine was a major hassle. Since our target was the home, and the era was 1981-1984, we started with 6502-based machines (I was hired to add some C-64 experience to a room full of Apple guys), and only reluctantly supported the PC (around the time of MS-DOS 2.1). Our most popular platforms (by sales) were the Apple II and the C-64. As an aside, this is the company I worked at where we literally used a PC jr as a doorstop when we closed-up shop. Having written and worked on floppy-based databases, I'd agree - there was limited consumer interest when your entire database had to fit on a single floppy. I remember helping my mother with a problem at her typing shop where they had to do some sort of mail list merge on a Kaypro... it was a slow, messy affair, and it was only a few hundred records. In context of the thread, this was in 1985, long after PCs were ensconced in the workplace. Many were still using CP/M machines bought in the previous 5 years. -ethan

Hi, Didn't forget....just not aware of, LOL. Actually, the book I read around 1982 about programming the 8086 (which is the only assembly language book I've ever disposed of BTW) went to great lengths to explain why the 8086 is, essentially, a 16-bit 8080. Whilst I fully agree that the reasons for the way the 8086 was designed make excellent BUSINESS sense, in terms of real technological progress it was, IMO, a very definite side-step. :-( But my point is, all of the Intel processors I've had direct dealings with (from a software/hardware design point of view) have been very backward in their overall architecture; though that said, the 8050 family are damn good at what they were designed for (if somewhat rough around the edges). I also did a *LOT* of 68k assembly language programming back in my ST days, was a lot of fun. With the exception of 8080 -> 8086, I can't offhand think of any examples where converting source code from one architecture to another would be simple and straightforward. True, but couldn't 6800 family peripheral chips be made to work with the 68k fairly easily? If you're going to have to re-write the code anyway, driving different peripheral chips shouldn't be too difficult (unless you're using Z80 peripherals with vectored interrupts, DMA etc). IKWYM. I don't recall much about the Z8000 now, but I did read the data sheets for it somewhere around 1984 (1983?). About all I remember is that it was a strange, illogical design. And that my impression was that it wouldn't catch on (ironically, mainly because of the 68000). Quite, when I built my first PC in 1990, I ran the MS-Dos version of Wordstar until I finally gave in and switched to Win95 aroud the end of '96. In fact, ISTR using it regularly on my ST in the late 80's using a PC emulator. Fun times.... :-) Actually, I remember reading an interview in an issue of Byte some years ago, where the leader of the PC design project was quoted as saying that his original choice for the processor was the 68000. However, they were forced to switch to the 8088 because one of Motorolas' two 68k fabrication facilities had gone bad, and Motorola couldn't guarantee delivery dates for the processors. And since they were also very pushed for time, and had experience of the Intel architecture from a previous project.... I'd like to think that if the 68k had been chosen we'd have had far more advanced PCs far quicker (I'm thinking back to the many 68k implementations of UNIX amongst other things). But I do take your point about the availability of software, let's face it, the *ONLY* reason I switched from my Atari ST to the PC was software. Although....if we'd had 68k/UNIX based boxes on our desktops instead of 8086/DOS who's to say that there wouldn't have been a similar explosion of software? TTFN - Pete.

---snip--- Hi When Federico Faggin spoke at CHM, I asked him why they never finished the math coprocessor for the Z8000. He said that by that time the writing was on the wall. Intel had captured the market with the PC. by the Federico and his team, Intel might never have actually been in the uP business. By the time I worked for them, it was about 50% of the business. The Japanese took over the RAM business with both cheaper prices and, obvious to the users, better quality parts. This pushed Intel to be more solidly in the uP business. Olivetti also made a M40 and M60 with the Z8000's but these were bigger boxes, like small mini's I still have 2 M20's that I play with every now and then. I like the PCOS operating system and I've played some with the CP/M-8000, that I got images from Al Kossow. These had to be reconstructed to work on the 5-1/4 inch drives but are fun to play with. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Like the way Microsoft Office Outlook works? You?ll love Windows Live Hotmail. http://imagine-windowslive.com/hotmail/?locale=en-us&ocid=TXT_TAGHM_mig…

On 25 May 2007 at 12:19, Chris M wrote: Scuse, please, but I wrote that. The IBM CS-9000. I've seen only one up for auction in the past few years. I've never seen the operating system, CSOS mentioned anywhere else in IBM's product line. Here's a little squib on the system: http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/cs9000.html Cheers, Chuck

On Mon, 2007-05-14 at 19:23 -0400, Evan Koblentz wrote: Let's see yours, then. It's a better website than mine... Gordon