[TUHS] Re: Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Peter Yardley <peter.martin.yardley@gmail.com>]

The DG Nova had a pretty nice architecture. 2 accumulators, 2 index registers, program counter, status register. No stack register tho. There was a micro processor version by Fairchild. 

Sent from my iPhone

> On 5 Jul 2024, at 5:36 pm, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 4 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:
> 
>> ARM or one of the smaller RISC-V flavor-sets (RISC-V is super-modular) 
>> would be a perfectly reasonable architecture to learn these days.  After 
>> the PDP-11 but before ARM I'd'a suggested 68000.  Definitely NOT x86 and 
>> its betentacled descendants.  Even so, you'd still want to treat it (if 
>> you're learning "how do computers work?") as if it were not superscalar,
>> even though it obviously is.  Which I guess is pushing me into "please 
>> let me just pretend it's a PDP-11 and keep all the scary pipelining and 
>> speculative execution and all the things that are hard to reason about 
>> below the layer where I need to care" territory.
> 
> Pretty much anything with a linear address space, an orthogonal 
> instruction set, and a stack will do, I think.
> 
> Was it John Gilmore who said "Segment registers are for worms"?
> 
> I dips me lid to those souls who implemented ALGOLW on the 360...
> 
>> And yeah, if you need me to sweep the floors, I'll sweep the floors, but 
>> if I'm needed to sweep the floors often, there's a management problem 
>> here, in that you can hire people who are much better at sweeping floors 
>> than I am for much less money than you hired me to do software 
>> engineering for.
> 
> I've worked in places where I've swept the floor (and also did the dishes 
> etc); I'll still need to be paid the same salary, though :-)
> 
> -- Dave