On 02/15/2016 02:29 PM, James Knott wrote:
On 02/15/2016 11:29 AM, Jeffrey L. Taylor wrote:
Real programmers enter, debug, and modify the program thru the front panel.
Of course, only mossbacks use a physical front panel. However, like the physical front panel users, the ROM command line debugger fight between hex and octal.
My first computer was an IMSAI 8080, which had a front panel. I also used to debug through the microcode on Data General Eclipse computers!
We also had a Interdata 8/32 in one of the labs at university. No real instruction set in the conventional sense, it was all microcode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interdata_7/32_and_8/32 In many ways it was a predecessor to the ideas of the ICL 2900 series, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICL_2900_Series where any program could also load custom microcode. So a program complied in FORTRAN, for example brought in microcode that optimized for FORTRAN. Later models had demand paged microcode. It was all a bit ridiculous. Surely there were better ways to optimise? In many ways this was a research project for Manchester university, subsidized by the government and floated on the back of British industry. Anyway, this all led me to working with bit-slice and AMD-2900 chip set and building custom specific processing architectures and microcoding them. I'm sure there could have been a postgraduate thesis there at the time but I wasn't interested in an academic career. -- A: Yes. > Q: Are you sure? >> A: Because it reverses the logical flow of conversation. >>> Q: Why is top posting frowned upon? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org