I agree that IBM should have used the Z8000. However, I know that Zilog could not have produced enough working chips. In the 1981-1982 period we had a hard time getting enough working chips for our own internal use. The ones we got were much faster than the 8086 though. Our Zeus (Unix) systems made MS-DOS on a PC look slow. OTOH even our Z80 system was faster then a PC. I think we were making 6MHz Z80s in 1981. I think our Z8000s were 6MHz or 8MHz.
-----Original Message----- From: John Summerfield [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, August 06, 2003 10:53 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Fwd: Re: big and little endian On Wed, 6 Aug 2003, Fargusson.Alan wrote: > I think that the 68000 is a simple bigendian. On the other hand I worked Yeah. I've got some round here: they're in the early Macs. I've also got a newer version of it (SMT) inside a JTEC terminal controller. It's a single-board computer, the sort of thing we'd have mortgaged our home for in the early 70s. The Zilog Z8000 was another big-endian CPU. A shame, I think, that IBM didn't use it instead of the 808x. My brain is definitely big-endian, and MASM confused things even worse by printing its bject code in "human-friendly" big-endian format with the result the object code printed was not what was actually generate. -- Cheers John. Join the "Linux Support by Small Businesses" list at http://mail.computerdatasafe.com.au/mailman/listinfo/lssb Copyright John Summerfield. Reproduction prohibited.
