[TUHS] Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?
Dave Horsfall
dave at horsfall.org
Fri Jul 5 17:36:38 AEST 2024
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
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