Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!ig!uwmcsd1!bbn!rochester!udel!rminnich
From: rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: stack machines (Burroughs)
Message-ID: <2868@louie.udel.EDU>
Date: 3 Jun 88 19:18:27 GMT
Article-I.D.: louie.2868
References: <1521@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1532@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <476@pcrat.UUCP> <9561@sol.ARPA> <1658@pt.cs.cmu.edu> <1035@astroatc.UUCP> <10074@sol
3 Jun 88 19:18:27 GMT
Reply-To: rminnich@udel.EDU (Ron Minnich)
Organization: University of Delaware
Lines: 27

In article <5141@nsc.nsc.com> stevew@nsc.UUCP (Steve Wilson) writes:
>I don't want to start any religious wars about comparing a Burroughs
>MCP against IBM's JCL that was available in the late 1970's.  But 
Well, the fact that burroughs was behind the state of the art does
not imply that it was worse than IBM, near as i can tell. I used the
MCP a lot, and yes it had lots of things even then that I would
like to see on Unix now; nevertheless it was far behind the
state of the art by 1975 or so. And the stack machine architecture
had similarly lost its early lead. Those of you familiar with 
E-mode on the burroughs machines know that it basically was a kludge
much like 286 segmentation in design!
>As for Burroughs(aka Unisys) not being interested in stack machines 
>anymore, well they sure seem to be concentrating pretty hard on the
>A-series boxes.  Last time I checked, this series was stack based. 
Yes, it is, I know cause i worked on the A15! There is a large market
of people who rely on that architecture mainly for historical reasons. 
But all the market surveys indicated that the B-series and A-series
were not going to set the world on fire sales-wise, and in fact
would be a decreasing share of the market. 
So for a long time to come you will see cost-reduced higher-performance
implementations of this architecture. 
That does not imply that 
Unisys sees its future development occurring in this area; in fact,
from what i see, they seem to like SPARC ...

-- 
ron (rminnich@udel.edu)