I worked on a PDP-11 and VAX and I can say that the reason good ideas  
from the past are not used is ....
1) NIH
2) no appreciation of history

The Apple Newton had a great way of doing cut and paste ...... that  
the iPhone has not adopted.
MA
> On Mar 22, 2009, at 9:21 PM, Vitaliy wrote:
>
> "William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
>> What it amounts to is that the PIC is an "accumulator based"
>> architecture extended with a bunch of operations that work directly  
>> on
>> memory (including IO space), while the AVR is a multiple-register
>> based machine with some exceptions.  I find the AVR architecture
>> generally more "pleasant" to use in assembler, but it in now way
>> reaches the heights of elegance of (say) a PDP-11 or PDP-10...
>
> You worked on a PDP-11? Wow! :-)
>
> I'm kind of curious why there doesn't seem to be (from my non-expert  
> POV) as
> much reuse of old proven concepts as one would expect. After all,  
> the same
> problems had to be solved for mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, and
> microcontrollers -- one would have thought that by now there would  
> be The
> One Best Way of doing certain things. Like, if you say that PDP-11's
> architecture was so great, why couldn't someone take it, and build a
> microcontroller based on it? What would be the tradeoff?
>
> Vitaliy
>
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