I read bits from the book in The Atlantic (I think) before I ever saw an MV. Some years later, my wife read the book for a class in her MBA program, and I read

I read bits from the book in The Atlantic (I think) before I ever saw an MV. Some years later, my wife read the book for a class in her MBA program, and I read the whole thing. A couple of points struck me then that may be of interest to the HN readership. First, the instruction set originally proposed by the architect was very VAX-like. It would probably have been great for those writing in assembler. But the end was approaching VAX-like instruction sets. Second, retaining the old Nova/Eclipse instruction set meant that one kept three general-purpose registers (well, sort of general-purpose: by convention, I think the stack pointer was in AC3). One also had no register-relative byte addressing. I liked the Novas and Eclipses, and learned a lot working on them. But the RISC-based UNIX machines took over from the minicomputers pretty quickly. [Edit: I don't think I've used an MV since about 1995--take any remarks with a grain of salt.]