CompuServe Messages

That sounds good. By nybble mode, do you mean the "page mode" that the Programmer's Journal guys are always talking about? From my vauge hardware-level understanding, standard dynamic RAM chips are accessed by feeding them seperate row and column addresses, then retrieving the data. "Page mode" RAMs let you give them a row address, then repeatedly give them column addresses and retrieve data, until you need data from a different row. (I may have rows & columns reversed…) Anyway, this greatly improves the speed because setting whichever of the two addresses that's eliminated is a costly operation. Or something like that. Is that what the '030 supports? Do you have a quick description of the 68851? I don't know anything about it, that's why I was asking what the MMU does. I suppose I could find a data sheet somewhere, but you are surely more understandable… <grin> I still think that the 68020 and the 80386, running at the same clock speed, are of very similar power. The '386 isn't trailing the '020 by that much in terms of release time. It's possible that in a year, a significant portion of engineering workstations will be using '386s simply because they're cheaper (price dragged down by the PC arena, where 100s of Ks of '386s will be used as fast 8088s). Or maybe a debugged 32532 will suddenly appear (hah). (Come to think of it, I don't know why Intel doesn't forget all this new crud and just come out with a simple 8086 that runs FAST… faster than the '386 emulating one, because that's its whole job. I guess that's up to NEC…) Oh, BTW (from the ancient past)… I'm still using the version of DIFF that I got from you (with a few insignificant modifications). Thanks! – Bela