[rescue] Re: sunpci note: TWO cards now available

[Dave McGuire]

On January 30, Brian Hechinger wrote:
> so who wants to resurect the VAX?  start making new VAX CPUs? :)

  This has been discussed a bit here & there.  Remember the Mentec
PDP11 deal...they're making *current technology* PDP11 hardware, and
continuing to maintain the OSs.

  Now, the VAX architecture is immensely more complex than the PDP11,
but I would think it'd be doable.

  The hard part would be getting them to turn loose of it.  They know
it's a good architecture, and they know it'd be a serious competitor
to everything else out there if it were reimplemented with
cutting-edge technology...so they might want to keep it "buried".

  They sold the PDP11 architecture when they thought it couldn't be made
to compete with their more current stuff...which was mostly correct,
largely due to the 22-bit address space limitation of the PDP11
architecture.  This isn't so with the VAX...in fact, in my opinion,
there are no inherent limitations in the VAX *architecture* (just the
architecture) aside from perhaps being CISC and not handling IEEE
floating point format (which could be added easily enough), that might
keep it from being a sweet high-end modern processor.

    -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
St. Petersburg, FL         "Less talk.  More synthohol." --Lt. Worf