VAXen RULE! (WAS Microkernels)

[Tony Duell]

> On the positive side, what is the most perfect computer architecture + 
> implementation people have come across here?
> Tell us why, especially if it's something like PERQ or Acorn RISC/pc 
> that is not common outside of a limited geographic area. 

Mosyt beuatiful piece of electronics (related to computation :-)) that 
it's been my pleasure to work on has to be the HP9100. It's an amazingly 
elegant design. On the other hand it's a lousy computer architecture, 
there's not even a full adder. Just increment and decrment on the main 
registers.

But my 'prize' for the nicrst architecture of all time is the classic 
PERQ, particualarly the 16K CPU version. It's very clean at the microcode 
level, you have 256 (!) gerenal purpose registers, with an index register 
to address them if you want it. You don't get hardware multiply and 
divide, but you do get MULSTEP and DIVSTEP -- hardware to do 1 bit of 
said operations. Just stick it in a microcode loop. And of course yuo can 
modify the microcode as much as you like.

-tony