[SunRescue] Re: rescue digest, Vol 1 #1105 - 18 msgs

[rescue at sunhelp.org]

hmv at meredithm.fsnet.co.uk writes:

>Nope. "Lbus" and "Sbus" (a UK-based re-seller has some cards in stock). 
>Don't many of the Symbolics machines pre-date Nubus ? Or am I mistaken 
>in how old Nubus is ?

The TI lisp machine is nubus. I thought the symbolics were as well.
I've only ever looked at the boards in our 3600 once, briefly.

>> I think it's odd that two of the most famous lisp environments were
>> on PDP-10 and Symbolics hardware, both of which are 36-bit, but the
>> word size is used for *completely* different reasons. Weird
>> coincidence.

>I must admit I'd always assumed that the PDP-10 and the MIT Lisp 
>Machine were the same word size for ease of moving stuff across. Have 
>you got any references for those differences ?

As I understand it, lisp on the 10 used the word size to fit 
two 18 bit pointers into each word, for a cons cell. The word
in a symbolics machine is actually only 32 bits of data, plus four
bits of "tag" data. I don't know the details beyond that.

-- david fischer -- dave at cca.org -- www.cca.org -- Cthulhu told me to. --