none (none.delete@this.none.com) on August 8, 2022 1:00 am wrote:
> Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 7, 2022 9:56 pm wrote:
> > Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on August 7, 2022 6:05 pm wrote:
> > > Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 7, 2022 5:37 pm wrote:
> > >
> > > > As much as I once loved the 68000, it is a horrid kludge that was
> > > > just thrown together without an understanding of software.
> > >
> > > The 68000 was designed in an era when serious programming was done
> > > in assembly rather than in C or something even higher level.
> > >
> > > An understanding that simpler instructions (especially regarding addressing
> > > modes and decode simplicity) combined with a cache was better came later.
> >
> > The 68000 was the poor man’s VAX, that is the sum total of the thinking going into the design.
>
> That's still better than 8086 that was designed to be a glorified i8085 even to the point of
> having an assembler that was able to translate i85 to i86 code.
>

That's almost true, except that 8086 was designed more as glorified 8080 than 8085.
It does not have equivalents of 8085 SIM and RIM instructions.
On the other hand, one could say that 8088 bus is more similar to 8085 than to 8080, but 8088 came later.

However x86 ISA became much better at 3rd generation while at about the same time 68K ISA became much worse. Poor man's VAX is acceptable, rich man's VAX - less so.

> Now we should start some emacs vs vi discussion for the fun :-)

Both emacs and vi (in form of VIM) are still widely used, so I don't see either as direct analogy to 68K.
Proper analogy would be an editor that was very popular in its prime, but by now is used only by retro-computing enthusiast. I am not enough of historian to suggest one.
In close and historically related field of word processors finding analogy to 68K would be easy.