[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[John Dallman]

In article <kifmjpF4bvU2 at mid.individual.net>, bill.gunshannon at gmail.com
(bill) wrote:

> I would love to see what the performance would be for any of these
> processors [DEC-10, DEC-20] made with today's tech.  I think even 
> without growing memory size they would be more than adequate and
> probably a lot better than some of the Windows Servers running
> applications today.

What sort of thing would you want to use them for? I don't know the
architecture well, but they seem to be limited to 30-bit addressing of
their 36-bit words. That's more or less 4GB, which will do for many
things, but there doesn't seem to be any obvious advantage of the
architecture that would make doing an commercial implementation
worthwhile. 

If you were keen, you could do an FPGA version: some Amiga fans have done
that for the Motorola 68000 family. http://www.apollo-core.com/

The painful part is the character size: 6-bit characters aren't adequate
for lots of modern work. Using 8-bit characters is probably best. That
wastes four bits per word, but allows you to use UTF-8 and communicate
with other kinds of machine. 

John