Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!nosc!ucsd!ucbvax!decwrl!labrea!glacier!jbn
From: jbn@glacier.STANFORD.EDU (John B. Nagle)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Mythical microprocessors
Message-ID: <17599@glacier.STANFORD.EDU>
Date: 2 Aug 88 07:27:56 GMT
References: <677@buengc.BU.EDU> <7650005@vx2.GBA.NYU.EDU>
Reply-To: jbn@glacier.UUCP (John B. Nagle)
Organization: Stanford University
Lines: 10


      The Z80000 was supposed to be a follow-on to the Z8000, a modestly
successful 16-bit micro very much like the PDP-11 in architecture.
Unfortunately, the Z8000 had almost exactly the same limitations as
the PDP-11 in terms of address space and organization of the memory
management system.  The architecture simply would not let a single
process use more than 64K code and 64K data.  This killed the product line.
There were a number of UNIX boxes built using the Z8000, including some
from Zilog, but it never really caught on.

					John Nagle