[Simh] Simh Digest, Vol 145, Issue 52

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2016-02-16 17:54, lists at openmailbox.org wrote:
> 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 ;-)

Of course, that would be nice. :-)

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

Today, yes. But it we roll back to the 80s, then the 68000 was the 
alternative, and I really think that the PDP-11 could have competed very 
well with that CPU.

	Johnny