> On May 4, 2025, at 2:24 PM, ben via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 2025-05-04 2:11 a.m., jos via cctalk wrote:
>>> I recall that system had many boards, the whole "CPU" box was external to
>>> the monitor (and in the earliest versions, the power supply was also a
>>> large external box). I can't really fathom creating a BASIC out of raw
>>> TTL, or maybe I'm misunderstanding the approach.
>> You build a processor with some TTL, and then implement a BASIC on that
>> microprocessor.
>> There is always this intermediate step, no machine executes BASIC directly
>> in TTL.
> Well for BASIC that is true.
> The Fairchild Symbol Computer was test to just how far TTL could go.
>
>> Look here for an example of a processor (Datapoint 2200) in TTL :
>> https://bitsavers.org/pdf/datapoint/2200/jdreesen_shematics/DP2200_mb.pdf
>> Jos
> Micocoded coded machines, could likely be programed to run basic.
>
> Ben.
Well, of course any general purpose computer can be made to run BASIC. If you
mean that a microcoded machine could directly implement a pseudo-code
representation of BASIC, sure, I suppose so. There isn't much point in that,
though. Better just to compile it.
A language for which specific machines have been built a number of times is
FORTH, which makes sense because it is a rather low level language that
explicitly manipulates data on stacks. And the execution model has two stacks,
so it is tempting to build a machine that directly deals with that. There are
some nice FPGA blocks for this, in VHDL or Verilog; one example I remember was
built to enable a robotics or machine vision application.
paul
