From: Pancho.Jones@proton.me   
      
   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+).   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)