Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing

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+).