[Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 145, Issue 52

[lists at openmailbox.org]

On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 17:49:27 +0100
Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> On 2016-02-16 17:43, lists at openmailbox.org wrote:
> > On Tue, 16 Feb 2016 11:40:09 -0500
> > William Pechter <pechter at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Actually, one of DEC's biggest mistakes was not OEMing the uVax
> >> chips... They would've killed the 68k had they had the uVaxII chipset
> >> available for early workstations.
> >
> > I'm not so sure about that. The 68k was used in an awful lot of devices
> > from handhelds (Palm) to TI calculators and a whole lot more than
> > workstations. Could handheld devices in that day run microVax chips?
> 
> For a lot of embedded, low power stuff, it would have made more sense to 
> use PDP-11s. But DEC had those chips as well, and was somewhat unwilling 
> in that market too. Imagine if they had tries to really push for getting 
> PDP-11s out there in all kind of devices, and made one or two more 
> implementations to shrink and reduce power... That could have been nice.

You're just saying that because you want to run an RSX-based smartphone ;-)

In all seriousness with today's FPGAs and microcontrollers you can probably
make just about any battery-powered device you could think up.