Probably read about this machine in Byte back
then but was programming PDP-11's. Was very
disappointed in IBM PC as IMO was far inferior to
PDP-11 which was was easier to interface to data
acquisition hardware and had a much nicer
instruction set. Ran into 68000 processor for
first time in 1986 when my father bought a 512 K
Mac and couldn't believe performance of this CPU
compared to PDP-11 - 24 bit addressing! and
inferior memory access to what Sage had. Also,
found 68000 instruction set very similar to
PDP-11 and had no trouble writing assembly code
for it a few years later and also really liked
Apple's debug switch which was best
implementation of a debugging system I've thus
far run into. Weird that Rod Coleman had 68000
instruction set associated with IBM 370 whereas
to me it was very PDP-11 like and 24 bit
addressing was a very nice feature (that was one similarity to IBM 360)
Other interesting aspect to SAGE history was the
influence of September 1966 issue of Scientific
American computer issue on Rod Coleman and lots
of other people I've talked to. Was so glad that
had this issue to read in 1966 and spent most of
my time in boring school classes designing logic
circuits and then building them at home using
discrete DTL logic with parts salvaged from surplus IBM boards.
Thanks for the link as didn't realize 68000 was
used for home systems before I ran into Mac.
This may be old news -- it was new to me, though.
https://suddendisruption.blogspot.com/search/label/Booting%20Sage%20Computer
I'm not really familiar with SAGE machines. They were not as
well-known in the UK, I think, being upmarket from the Apple ][ and
IBM PC, both of which were eye-wateringly expensive by UK standards of
the time.
Also, they were terminal-based things and even back then I was
interested in boxes with graphics. :-)
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