[TUHS] Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?
Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley at gmail.com
Fri Jul 5 20:18:41 AEST 2024
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 at 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
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