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Comment by zinekeller | Hacker News Reader

Oh, wow, it's indeed nice (even though it's more like TransMeta's x86 implementation than a silicon-level design!) Reminds me of the efforts to implement the Japanese SuperH(2) RISC instruction set.

(To you: you might want to clarify in the title that this is the VAX architecture they're talking about (since "vax" unfortunately might be confused here with the now-used shorthand for vaccine).)

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VAX was a heavily microcoded design, so there wasn't really "silicon level" implementation of VAX instructions themselves - the microcode decoded the instructions and set inputs to execution units, and unlike some modern microcoded designs, there was much less hardwired implementation AFAIK

At least some VAX models supported user-supplied microcode and thus a customizable ISA. This could be used, for example, to implement a Prolog abstract machine directly on the CPU[1].

[1] http://hps.ece.utexas.edu/pub/gee_micro19.pdf

I've been meaning to check out J2 (the FPGA SH-2 core) for a while now. Mostly haven't because there doesn't seem to be as much support/howtos for the chip as there is for say arm/mips/m68k/whathaveyou. Most Super-H knowledge I can find online centers around programming the Dreamcast's SH-4 with GCC.

or more likely the brand of vacuum cleaners :)

I felt quite old recently when someone at work recommended a Vax carpet cleaner and I mentioned that my first email account was on a Vax... and they had no idea what I was talking about. Had never heard of the platform, or of DEC.

Fun fact: the vacuum cleaner company (https://www.vax.co.uk) had "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" as its advertising slogan: http://foldoc.org/vax

I have a vague recollection that “nothing sucks like a vax” was a parody and never the vacuum cleaner’s slogan. A cursory google search doesn’t pull up anything authoritative and it seems like most of the claims that the vacuum cleaner people used it are all worded nearly identically. The photocopied afi saw back in the 80s was too on the nose to be really believable, feeling an awful lot like the mouse balls memo.

In that case it may be an urban myth, with its origin in the (apparently real) Electrolux advert shown here: https://web.archive.org/web/20180707150205/http://adland.tv/...

The ad I remember showed an actual vacuum cleaner. I'd seen the one you linked to in my cursory googling. I'd hoped it would have the same vacuum cleaner picture to make the identification that much easier.

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