William "Chops" Westfield wrote:
> The thing about the pdp-11 was that it was held up as a sort of holy grai=
l
> of elegant architectures.

It actually was quite good, especially compared to some other architectures
of the time. Plus, it came with a particularly powerful macro assembler tha=
t
was also quite nice to work with. We had a PDP-11/45 in the computer scienc=
e
lab and a PDP-11/70 in the EE lab when I was in college (1976-1980).

> Perhaps it's a matter of scale. "Everything" was done on a couple of
> well-known architectures in those days, but "those days" didn't last very
> long, and the "lots of software for that architecture" is actually dwarfe=
d
> by SW written since. I mean, the PDP11 came out in 1970 and was pretty
> architecturally dead by 1981, whereas the x86 came out in 1980 and is sti=
ll
> around...

Exactly. The huge base of software that sprang up for the IBM PC far
outweighed any considerations of the elegance (or lack thereof) of the
hardware architecture.

-- Dave Tweed
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