[TUHS] who invented the link register

[Marc Donner]

Peter Capek found this obit of John Griffith.  Indirect addressing patent,
for whatever it’s worth.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/bradenton/name/john-griffith-obituary?id=34037343

On Wed, Oct 26, 2022 at 1:29 AM Angelo Papenhoff <aap at papnet.eu> wrote:

> On 26/10/22, Ralph Corderoy wrote:
> > > Before these instructions, a subroutine call would require one
> > > additional memory location, to hold the return address for each point
> > > of call, and one additional instruction, one to load the return
> > > address into the accumulator and one to store it into the code at the
> > > end of the subroutine.  (The latter could be the first instruction of
> > > the subroutine.)
> >
> > So before SP and TA, would the ‘latter’ instruction at the start of the
> > subroutine, which stores the accumulator holding the return address, be
> > modifying all sixteen bits of the location unlike TA which only modifies
> > the bottom eleven?
>
> "Before" sounds a bit misleading. The Whirlwind ran its first actual
> program
> (from test storage, i.e. 27 switch and 5 flip-flop registers) in late 1949,
> so the change we're talking about here was early enough that the old way
> of doing jumps was only ever theoretical.
> Still, there was from the start a td (transfer digits) instruction,
> which stores the address bits from AC into the addressed location. ta is
> much the same except it stores A.
>
> > If so, did the accumulator's top bits hold the ‘return’ op-code or was
> > there another instruction near the subroutine's end which loaded the
> > 11-bit address before a second instruction jumped to it?
>
> Without ta, a subroutine jump could be done like this:
>
>         ca reta         ; load return address
>         sp foo          ; jump to foo
> ret,    ...             ; return here
>
> foo,    td foo1         ; store return address
>         ...             ; do stuff
> foo1,   sp .            ; return from here
>
> reta,   ret
>
> Of course then you lose the possibility of passing some argument in AC.
>
> Cheers,
> aap
>
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