> You bet!  One of the few machines that actually worked around
> National's bug list and produced a functioning machine.  I still
> shudder to think of those early companies (like the poor folks who
> produced the PERQ) who were killed by that same bug list.  SIGH!

That same bug list didn't kill the PERQ -- the PERQ never dreamed of
anything as aesthetically pleasing as a 32000-series instruction set.
It had a CPU built up from AMD 2901 4-bit ALU slices, with microcode
(at least for POS and Accent) that gave it a P-code like instruction
set called Q-code.

What killed it was a horrible and utterly proprietary design, along
with equally awful system software.  (I once saw PERQ translated as
Poorly Engineered and Remiss in Quality, which pretty much sums it
up.)

--
Karl Swartz	|Home	kls@chicago.com
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Moderator of sci.aeronautics.airliners -- Unix/network work pays the bills