From: Adam Thornton <athornton@gmail.com>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A New History of Modern Computing - my thoughts
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2021 16:35:01 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAP2nic2LEg=CQG8JEvtcA1zvgJxbRPak999G4e6QWk-Aao-ksw@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20211128231203.3BCB818C075@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
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Getting a bit far afield from Unixes, but A Quick Rundown Of Instruction
Sets I Have Known, more or less in the order I learned them:
6502: you never forget your first love, and, sure, it's constrained, but
it's elegant and concise and I still adore it.
68k: Lovely. I used it before I ever used the PDP-11, but in retrospect
it's like the PDP-11 but more so. Roomy, comfortable, regular. Too bad it
lost to x86 in the marketplace.
8051: I mean, OK, I get it, you need a low-cost embedded architecture and
it's the 1980s, but...yuck.
x86-and-descendents: the less said the better. Maybe I just don't like
Intel's designs?
SPARC: It's not bad. Having lots of registers is nice. But by the time it
came along compilers were good enough that I never actually needed to use
it in anger.
S/360-and-descendents: The S/360 is OK, even nice, in a very 1960s IBM
way. And then its evolution just KEPT adding ever more baroque filigrees
onto it. Don't get me wrong, I love SIE, because I love VM, but even that
is kind of a bag on the side, and by the time you get to System z...this is
what happens when you don't start over from a clean sheet every so often.
PDP-11: There's a very good reason it was used as a model architecture in
coursework for decades. Also regular and comfortable.
TI-99/4A (more or less TI 9900): I like microcode as much as anyone but
honestly this is pretty silly here, folks.
These days I'm kinda sorta poking at RISC-V and ARM. Not that I need to,
but they seem nifty.
Adam
On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 4:15 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:
> > The ++ operator appears to have been.
>
> One would expect that most people on this list would have read "The
> Development of the C Language", by Dennis Ritchie, which makes perfectly
> clear
> (at 'More History') that the PDP-11 had nothing to do with it:
>
> Thompson went a step further by inventing the ++ and -- operators, which
> increment or decrement; their prefix or postfix position determines
> whether
> the alteration occurs before or after noting the value of the operand.
> They
> were not in the earliest versions of B, but appeared along the way.
> People
> often guess that they were created to use the auto-increment and
> auto-decrement address modes provided by the DEC PDP-11 on which C and
> Unix
> first became popular. This is historically impossible, since there was no
> PDP-11 when B was developed.
>
> https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html
>
> thereby alleviating the need for Ken to chime in (although they do allow a
> very efficient implementation of it).
>
> Too much to hope for, I guess.
>
> Noel
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-11-28 23:37 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-11-28 23:12 Noel Chiappa
2021-11-28 23:35 ` Adam Thornton [this message]
2021-11-29 1:53 ` John Cowan
2021-11-29 13:48 ` Dan Halbert
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2021-11-28 20:26 Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 21:07 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-28 21:15 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 21:31 ` Ken Thompson
2021-11-28 21:47 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 22:17 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-29 0:19 ` Clem Cole
2021-11-29 1:12 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 2:23 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-30 19:27 ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-12-01 8:46 ` Rich Morin
2021-12-01 12:28 ` Al Kossow
2021-11-30 3:18 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 1:18 ` George Michaelson
2021-11-29 1:36 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-29 1:47 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-29 7:46 ` arnold
2021-11-29 7:52 ` arnold
2021-11-29 14:44 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 12:11 ` Michael Kjörling
2021-11-28 21:23 ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-11-28 21:39 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-11-28 22:41 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-28 21:40 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 15:37 ` Phil Budne
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