On Tuesday, 28 September 2010 at 22:59:22 -0400, John Cowan wrote: > On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Larry McVoy wrote: > >> Color me old school.  I like MIPS, I worked at SGI (got married to >> an old school MIPS gal) but PDP-11 is so frigging intuitive.  How >> can you not understand that instruction set?  If you can't, well, >> sorry, not so much in my book.  It's like a stripped down C. > > Yeah. I used it on and off, but my serious assembler programming > was on the PDP-8. Now *that* was seriously small, but you had to > know the tricks, like how to find out the absolute address of the > 128-word memory page following the one you are on when writing PIC > code for OS/8 device drivers, or how to microprogram the operate > instructions get interesting constants into the AC. That was my first machine too (well, a PDP-12, which was really a hybrid PDP-8/LINC-8, but I only used the PDP-8 instructions). That was a nice, compact instruction set. It has the great advantage that I can still remember just about every instruction today. Remember the autoincrement registers? Even in those days they looked like a kludge, but they helped a lot. >> Come on - has anyone ever seen a better instruction set?  More >> complicated, yeah, holy moly, yeah.  But cleaner?  We owe DEC >> for that one. > > I remember how appalled I was when I saw the VAX instruction set. > Luckily, it didn't matter: I never did assembler again. Still, > trying to make people think in octal at this late date seems > unnecessary. It's funny how long octal clung on. It should have gone away with 8 bit bytes. But somehow I still have a soft spot for octal, and numbers like 7778 still look wrong. >> Personally, I like anyone who can do any assembler.  One of my interview >> questions is "have you written swtch?" >> >>  If you don't get the question you are not an OS person, >> if you are, of course you get it. Hmm. Am I expected to understand this? Seriously, I don't know how many people really wrote anything like swtch (). Greg -- Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. See http://www.lemis.com/grog/email/signed-mail.php for more details. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 195 bytes Desc: not available URL: