I found SoaNM interesting because I worked on Data General minis, both the 16-bit ones and the 32-bit ones. You might find it interesting to go back and look at

I found SoaNM interesting because I worked on Data General minis, both the 16-bit ones and the 32-bit ones. You might find it interesting to go back and look at the assumptions Data General worked on in light of what happened within a few years. The design team originally wanted something VAX-like, e.g. with an instruction set designed to make assembly coding easy--RISC made that unfashionable. I also found it interesting that the need to preserve the original instruction set within the new meant that the 32-bit minis were stuck with four general-purpose registers and no register-relative byte addressing. As far as I know, all that was left of DG was bought up by EMC for the sake of DG's Clariion SANs.