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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: is Vax addressing sane today
Date: Tue, 08 Oct 2024 06:14:59 GMT
Organization: Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
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Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> writes:
>Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> schrieb:
>> I think that ARM did not exist for John Mashey.
>
>When was his definition made?

<https://homepages.cwi.nl/%7Erobertl/mash/RISCvsCISC>

He reposted in 1995, the first few postings have no date, but they
include the IBM RS/6000 (1990) and 68040 (1990), but not the Alpha
(1992), so I expect that it happened between 1990 and 1992.  The ARM
was first released in a development kit for the BBC Micro in 1986, and
then to the mass market in the Archimedes in 1987.

My guess is that it did not exist for John Mashey because it did not
originiate in the USA and was sold mainly in home computers and
usually did not run Unix.

Somewhat to my surprise, I just read that there was
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_iX>, which would work on many (but
not all) Archimedes models with some additional hardware (in
particular, a hard disk), and that they sold complete workstations
like the R140 that included this hardware; the R140 (8MHz) cost GBP
3500 in 1989 (without Ehernet).  The R260 (30MHz ARM3, 8MB RAM, 100MHz
HDD, with Ethernet) cost GBP 3995 in 1990 (or as R225 without hard
disk GBP 1995), which was probably pretty competetive with the likes
of DG Aviion AV 100 (16MHz 88100, 8MB, diskless with 20" monitor for
$4000 in 1990
<https://www.techmonitor.ai/technology/data_general_outdoes_sun_with_4000_17_mips_av_100_risc_station>),
the DECStation 3100, or the HP 9000/425, machines that I had contact
with at the time.  A problem may have been that they did not have an
FPU before 1993 (except for the R140, but that cost GBP 599).

>ARM was rather late to the RISC game, this might have been literally
>true.

What makes you think so?  Did you read that in krone.at?

- anton
-- 
'Anyone trying for "industrial quality" ISA should avoid undefined behavior.'
  Mitch Alsup, <c17fcd89-f024-40e7-a594-88a85ac10d20o@googlegroups.com>