[ih] words and bytes [Re: "network unix"]

[jeanjour at comcast.net (John Day)]

Yea, I have always wondered about that.  The minicomputer companies had ?done it? to IBM you would have thought they would be looking over their shoulders.  But I guess corporate culture was just too strong and they couldn?t shift to a consumer model.


> On Oct 10, 2016, at 16:45, John R. Levine <johnl at iecc.com> wrote:
> 
>>> There was a competing 16 bit word addressed design by the designer of
>>> the PDP-8, which after DEC rejected it became the DG Nova.
>> 
>> I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm not sure it's accurate. That competing
>> design has surfaced (Google "PDP-X"), and it's not very much like the Nova.
> 
> Huh, I'd missed that.  You're right, it was more like a stripped down 
> PDP-10 than the Nova.  But it's definitely true that Ed DeCastro who 
> designed the PDP-8 and I believe the PDP-X left to form Data General.
> 
> Now I'm thinking about the eventual fate of DEC and DG, both clobbered by 
> PCs.  DEC came out with single chip package PDP-8 and J-11, and DG with 
> single chip Micronova, but they were both too little too late.
> 
> I guess the PDP-11 was more influential, since the x86 series uses the 
> 11's (at the time) unsual little-endian byte addressing.
> 
> Regards,
> John Levine, johnl at iecc.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
> Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly
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