From: andreas.kahari@icm.uu.se (Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri)
Subject: [TUHS] And now ... Weirdnix?
Date: Mon, 18 Sep 2017 12:39:11 +0200 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170918103911.2bok6nfjpbbm6cqq@client.local> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <201709180831.v8I8V6LB021088@freefriends.org>
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(This is a copy of an email I sent from the wrong address. If the first
(identaical) version of the message eventually arrives, just ignore it)
On Mon, Sep 18, 2017 at 02:31:06AM -0600, arnold at skeeve.com wrote:
> That Pr1me had a Unix emulation layer is news to me (I think). I worked
> on the Georgia Tech Software Tools Subsystem for Pr1me Computers for
> several years. (Oh, how I wish I had saved that last release tape!!!)
>
> Primos was a terribly weird OS, but the SWT subsystem made it almost
> Unix-like and very pleasant and usable. The mark parity business
> was only one of the weirdnesses of that machine. Georgia Tech even
> had a C compiler for it. sizeof(char) was 1, of course, but it was 16
> bits, because the instruction mode used didn't have 8 bit byte pointers.
>
> I can't claim credit for GT-SWT; I came along after it was mature
> and stable, but I did do a few nice things.
>
> Arnold
>
> Nigel Williams <nw at retrocomputingtasmania.com> wrote:
[cut]
I've been wondering about this for some time, if a byte isn't 8 bits on
an architecture, how would you go about calculating memory sizes in a
way that makes it comparable between machines?
A 32 KB memory buffer is 262144=32*1024*8 bits on one machine, but
294912=32*1024*9 bits on another. That's a difference of 32 Kbit.
Of course, it may not matter since both buffers contains as many
items/bytes, but for the machine as a whole you can't say "this machine
has X MB of memory" without mentioning the byte length. A machine with
"n" bit words would be able to "store less information" in memory than a
machine with the same number of MB of RAM but with "n+x" bit words.
How would you do for even more exotic hardware?
What if sizeof(char) != 1 for example?
Maybe this isn't/wasn't an issue at all?
Cheers,
Kusalananda
--
Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri,
National Bioinformatics Infrastructure Sweden (NBIS),
Uppsala University, Sweden.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2017-09-18 10:39 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 22+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-09-17 7:03 Warren Toomey
2017-09-17 7:28 ` arnold
2017-09-17 8:10 ` David Arnold
2017-09-17 12:52 ` Adam Sampson
2017-09-17 14:23 ` Steve Simon
2017-09-17 18:50 ` Chet Ramey
2017-09-17 19:01 ` Derrik Walker v2.0
2017-09-18 12:02 ` arnold
2017-09-17 14:49 ` Dennis Boone
2017-09-18 7:27 ` Nigel Williams
2017-09-18 8:31 ` arnold
2017-09-18 10:39 ` Andreas Kusalananda Kähäri [this message]
2017-09-18 11:59 ` Michael Kjörling
2017-09-19 1:54 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-09-19 7:07 ` Ian Zimmerman
2017-09-19 14:09 ` [TUHS] PR1ME - was " Toby Thain
2017-09-17 15:08 ` [TUHS] " Nemo
2017-09-18 23:57 ` Dave Horsfall
2017-10-04 5:58 ` Tom Ivar Helbekkmo
2017-10-04 16:15 ` George Michaelson
[not found] <mailman.1035.1505674910.3779.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-09-18 11:41 ` [TUHS] " David
2017-09-18 13:15 ` Chet Ramey
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