From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cowan@ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2010 22:59:22 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] 2.11BSD cross compiler In-Reply-To: <20100929023819.GA12919@bitmover.com> References: <20100929005148.GA8032@bitmover.com> <20100929023819.GA12919@bitmover.com> Message-ID: 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. > 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. > Personally, I like anyone who can do any assembler.  One of my interview > questions is "have you written swtch?" /me chuckles. >  If you don't get the question you are not an OS person, > if you are, of course you get it. Well, I know what it is but I've never written it. There was a bug in the V6 kernel version anyhow. > Ken Witte - wonder where he is now. Too many others out there, alas.