Martin Gregorie wrote:
On Sat, 16 Aug 2008 21:46:18 -0400, John W Kennedy wrote:
Martijn Lievaart wrote:
On Thu, 14 Aug 2008 18:33:30 -0400, John W Kennedy wrote:
Actually, I was thinking of the 1401. But both the 1620 and the 1401
(without the optional Advanced Programming Feature) share the basic
omission of any instruction that could do call-and-return without
hard-coding an adcon with the address of the point to be returned to.
(The Advanced Programming Feature added a 1401 instruction, Store
B-address Register, that, executed as the first instruction of a
subroutine, could store the return-to address.)
Raaaagh!!!!
Don't. Bring. Back. Those. Nightmares. Please.
The 1401 was a decent enough processor for many industrial tasks -- at
that time -- but for general programming it was sheer horror.
But the easiest machine language /ever/.
What? Even easier than ICL 1900 PLAN or MC68000 assembler? That would be
difficult to achieve.
I said "machine language" and I meant it. I haven't touched a 1401 since
1966, and haven't dealt with a 1401 emulator since 1968, but I can
/still/ write a self-booting program. In 1960, some people still looked
on assemblers (to say nothing of compilers) as a useless waste of
resources that could be better applied to end-user applications, and the
1401 was designed to be programmable in raw machine language. Even shops
that used assembler nevertheless frequently did bug fixes as
machine-language patches, rather than take the time to run the assembler
again. (SPS, the non-macro basic assembler, ran at about 70 lines a
minute, tops.)
--
John W. Kennedy
"The bright critics assembled in this volume will doubtless show, in
their sophisticated and ingenious new ways, that, just as /Pooh/ is
suffused with humanism, our humanism itself, at this late date, has
become full of /Pooh./"
-- Frederick Crews. "Postmodern Pooh", Preface
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