[Info-vax] Intel proposal to simplify x86-64

[Neil Rieck]

On Monday, June 5, 2023 at 1:05:05 AM UTC-4, terry-... at glaver.org wrote:

> The 8600 / 8650 also had full compatibility mode (but the 8600 was originally the VAX-11/790 before being renamed). 
> 
> Work on the MicroVAX showed that infrequently-used parts of the VAX instruction set could be emulated with minor hardware assists. The same sort of thing was done with the PDP-11 instruction set. Later versions of the VAX RSX layered product implemented PDP-11 emulation for CPUs that didn't have it natively. 
> 

Thanks for this. Although I began working on VAX systems in 1987 but didn't know about VAX-11/790 or that it had been renamed 8600.

We migrated to a dual host VAX-8550 VAXcluster in 1988 and I recall one of the older guys on our team crabbing that RSX applications were no longer available. Based upon your comment it appears that our machine was missing the VAX RSX layered product. (this is something else I didn't know about until now)   

Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://neilrieck.net
http://neilrieck.net/OpenVMS.html