[TUHS] 2.11BSD cross compiler

Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com
Wed Sep 29 13:55:34 AEST 2010


On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 05:17:33AM +0200, Steve Nickolas wrote:
> On Tue, 28 Sep 2010, 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.
>>
>> Come on - has anyone ever seen a better instruction set?  More
>> complicated, yeah, holy moly, yeah.  But cleaner?  We owe DEC
>> for that one.
>
> Dunno, the only instruction set I really grok is 65C02, which is by your  
> standards probably little more than a toy.

Oh, no.  Useful.  There was similar Intel (i think) cpu that was flashable.
I wrote code for it that muxed two lines over one serial line.  I'm sorta
proud of this, this was back in the BLIT days (loved that terminal, holy
crap, loved it).  I was a grad student at Wisconsin and we had one long
serial port line to our office, no ethernet (this was back when 10Mbit
was really weird).  Shared an office with another guy and we had one
blit.  I talked the department out of another one, and did a wire wrapped
board with that CPU on it and all it did was use the 8th bit to mux.
Bit set, his blit, not set, my blit.

Worked fantastic until the blits melted.  Still miss those, they were the
X terminal ahead of their time. 

Anyhoo, the 6502 is a fine little processor and knowing how to make it
sing is a useful skill.

It's not the toy-ness so much, it's what you do with it.  You can do a
lot with that CPU, ask any car company.
-- 
---
Larry McVoy                lm at bitmover.com           http://www.bitkeeper.com



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