[ih] bytes [Re: "network unix"]

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 11/10/2016 08:32, Noel Chiappa wrote:
>     > From: "John Levine" <johnl at iecc.com>
> 
>     > There was a competing 16 bit word addressed design by the designer of
>     > the PDP-8, which after DEC rejected it became the DG Nova.
> 
> I hear this repeated a lot, but I'm not sure it's accurate. That competing
> design has surfaced (Google "PDP-X"), and it's not very much like the Nova.

I jumped from programming a PDP-8 to programming an Imlac PDS-1, which
struck me at the time as being remarkably like a 16-bit PDP-8. The core
was word-addressed. There was a separate graphics processor which also took
16-bit instructions, but vectors were defined in 8-bit bytes. There's no
resemblance to the PDP-X description.

I believe the Imlac founders had jumped ship from DEC in 1968.

(The first protocol I designed and implemented was for booting and driving
PDS-1s from an IBM 1800, in 1971, at CERN.)

   Brian