[Info-vax] Wasn't VAX first??

[Arne Vajhøj]

JF Mezei wrote:
> Bob Koehler wrote:
>>   VAX wasn't a single chip processor until MicroVAX II, a few years
>>   later.
> 
> Was the Microvax I multi chip processor ?
> 
> Just curious on what "claim to fame" the Microvax I would have had since
>  the term "Microvax" had been used to denote a "microprocessor chip" as
> far as I know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vax

<quote>
The MicroVAX I represented a major transition within the VAX family. At 
the time of its design, it was not yet possible to implement the full 
VAX architecture as a single VLSI chip (or even a few VLSI chips as was 
later done with the V-11 CPU of the VAX 8200/8300). Instead, the 
MicroVAX I was the first VAX implementation to move most of the 
complexity of the VAX instruction set into emulation software, 
preserving just the core instructions in hardware. This new partitioning 
substantially reduced the amount of microcode required and was referred 
to as the "MicroVAX" architecture. In the MicroVAX I, the ALU and 
registers were implemented as a single gate-array chip while the rest of 
the machine control was conventional logic.

A full VLSI (microprocessor) implementation of the MicroVAX architecture 
then arrived with the MicroVAX II's 78032 (or DC333) CPU and 78132 
(DC335) FPU.
</quote>

Arne