Subj : Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing
To   : The Natural Philosopher
From : Pancho
Date : Fri Aug 30 2024 16:20:51

On 30/08/2024 15:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 30/08/2024 15:39, mm0fmf wrote:
>> On 30/08/2024 14:28, John Aldridge wrote:
>>> In article <20240829191334.570e88c7507598ffe5b28d87@eircom.net>,
>>> steveo@eircom.net says...
>>>>>>     Portable code should only rely on the standards not
>>>>>> implementations, some very weird possibilities are legal within the
>>>>>> standard.
>>>>>
>>>>> Heh, yes. I worked for several years on a machine where a null pointer
>>>>> wasn't all bits zero, and where char* was a different size to any
>>>>> other
>>>>> pointer.
>>>>
>>>>     That rings vague bells, what was it ?
>>>
>>> Prime. It was word, not byte, addressed, so a char* had to be bigger.
>>>
>> I used a Prime750 at Uni. But only undergrad tasks in Prime BASIC and
>> some Fortran. It seemed quite fast at the time in timeshare mode with
>> plenty of undergrads using it. But the CPU was only as fast as an 8MHz
>> 68000!
>>
> That is the staggering thing. CPU performance in the mini era wasn't
> that hot at all.
>
> I see someone has made a Pi PICO emulate a range of 6502 based computers
> - apple II etc.
>
> I am fairly sure a PI Zero could outperform a 386 running SCO Unix...and
> that was pretty comparable with - if not better than - a PDP 11.
>
>

The 386 slaughtered most of the Unix Minis of the time.

The PDP 11 was already a legacy predecessor of the Vax, did they even
have demand paging? PDP 11s were around in some of the companies I
worked for, but they were for the old codger programmers (i.e. 30+).

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