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Date   : Wed, 05 Apr 1989 19:26:25 GMT
From   : att!ihlpl!knudsen@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Knudsen)
Subject: New processor rumour

I'll 2nd the notion that 8-bitters aren't dead yet -- maybe not
even sick.  The Motorola 6809, last & best of the 8-bitters,
is still powering the OS9 multi-tasking, windowing OS in 100's
of 1000 of Color Computers.  It's an easy and fun chip to write assembler
for (being orthogonal and having lots of PDP-11 style addressing modes
on top of a 6502-type architecture for speed and simplicity) but
also a very easy machine to compile C, Forth, and Pascal for.

 Lots of applications (data communications, word processing, MIDI music)
deal in 8-bit bytes, so 16 or 32 bit architectures are overkill.
-- 
Mike Knudsen  Bell Labs(AT&T)   att!ihlpl!knudsen
Round and round the while() loop goes;
"Whether it stops," Turing says, "no one knows!"

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