Hans Witvliet wrote:
On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 14:28 -0500, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
Hans Witvliet wrote:
On Fri, 2007-12-07 at 12:59 -0500, James Knott wrote:
The Data General Eclipse line had a feature called "Writable Control
Store", which could be used to add custom instructions to the CPU. The
VAX 11/780 had it's microcode loaded from floppy at boot, but I don't
recall if it was changeable in the same manner as the Eclipse WCS.
Floppy?
It was a real huge 8" flop ... (still have them here)
Holding all of about 50k or so?
I remember seeing some of those in an office supply store
in Hafir-Al-Batin, Saudi Arabia back in 1992.
hw
No! A (for that time) decent 2MB (rediculous these days)
I used it on flex & uniflex OS on my 6809.
Still beautiful DISC cpu (decent instruction set computer ;)
All orthoginal instructions on one A4 page.
Still regret it that Intel won that battle.
As someone who loves assembly language, me too.
However, by the time of the 80386, the Intel chips
were (and remain) strongly influenced by the IBM
370 programming architecture(*) and instruction set,
which was well-proven to be both efficient, and
well-suited to multi-process computing (although
I still think it's completely ugly!)
(*) although the internal architecture has been
radically changed several times, the programmer's
architecture has remained fairly stable, and 100%
backwards compatible.
hw
--
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
