From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Date: Fri, 15 Sep 2017 11:21:02 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: [TUHS] B Source Code
Message-ID: <20170915152102.3B83018C0A3@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>

    > From: Dave Horsfall

    > Did anyone actually use the WCS?

Well, the uassembler was a product for a while, so they must have..

    > I had visions of implementing CSAV and CRET on our -60, but never did
    > get around to it. 

I recently had the idea of programming them into an M792 ROM card (100nsec
access time); user programs couldn't have used it without burning a segment
(to map in the appropriate part of the I/O space), but it might have sped up
the kernel some (and it would have been trivial to add, once the card was
programmed - with a soldering iron - BTDT, BITD :-).

Haven't gotten to it yet - still looking for an M792 (I don't want to trash
any of my pre-programmed M792-xx's :-).


    > From: Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com>

    > A big issue, again IIRC, was the microcode compiler/tools for the WSC
    > ran on RSX so it meant UNIX was not running, which was not popular.

Why not just write a Unix-native one? They aren't that much work - I created a
uassembler overnight (literally!) for the QSIC project Dave Bridgham and I
have been working on.

It's been improved a lot since the first version (e.g. the entire uengine
description is now read in from a config file, instead of being compiled in),
but that first version did work fine...

Or was the output format not documented?

	Noel