24 Oct
2025
24 Oct
'25
8:19 p.m.
Well if you know how to write microcode on an 11/60 or an 11/780 you can
probably build a pdp8 instruction set without too much difficulty. I
would wonder if a 780 would be that much faster as both systems were TTL
and the 32 bit word size is not going to be too much different.
One might have better luck writing a pdp8 on the WD WCS-11 memory space.
But that would probably still be a slug.
C
That did seem to speed things up too,as well.
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From the PDP-11 FAQ.
Fastest PDP-8
Trivia item: did you note anywhere that the 11/60 was used to implement
the world's fastest PDP-8? The 8 support group for years used an 11/60
RSTS system down the hall, running custom microcode addons to implement
a high speed PDP8 emulator.
Rumour has it that some hacker also did this on a VAX-11/780, which
would definitely out-run the 11/60 version.
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I wonder if the custom microcode is still around?
Ben.