[Info-vax] Hard links on VMS ODS5 disks

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2023-07-27 21:45, John Dallman wrote:
> 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.

Well. That last part could be expanded more. Since a byte on a PDP-10 
could be anything from 1 bit to 36 bits, you can do a lot. The KCC C 
compiler uses 9-bit words. And there is even a UTF-9 defined. :-D

   Johnny