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[James Knott]

Phillip Mills wrote:
> On Aug 23, 2004, at 11:06 AM, James Knott wrote:
> 
>> Those used to be considered a fairly powerful system.  Then the 386 
>> came out and had as much computing horsepower as the VAX!.
>> A bit cheaper too.  ;-)
> 
> 
> I once worked with a person who had a functional clone of VMS that ran 
> on Intel chips.  It was cute, but not terribly quick.  One of the neat 
> VMS tricks was that the VAX architecture included opcodes implemented 
> specifically to support common OS operations like scheduling and context 
> switching.

Another thing, was the microcode, which ran the CPU, was loaded in from 
floppy, on boot up.  If you were so inclined, you could write your own 
instructions.  The Data General Eclipse computers also had that ability, 
but instead of loading it from floppy at boot, you had to load the WCS 
(writable control store), after the computer had booted.

The VAX had the LSI-11, which included the floppy drive and was also 
what the terminal connected to (remember STP?).  If not being used for 
booting or running the monitor program, the floppy and terminal could be 
used as regular devices, attached to the VAX.  Incidentally, those VAX 
systems were my first experience with ethernet (thicknet), though my 
first network experience was with some Collins 8500C systems.  Collins 
had invented the first computer lan back in the 60's, but used time 
division multiplexing on the cable, instead of packets.
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