[TUHS] mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Larry McVoy]

On Fri, Jul 05, 2024 at 05:38:03PM -0400, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Peter Yardley <peter.martin.yardley at gmail.com> said:
> >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. 
> 
> It did, but it was word addressed which makes it an historical
> curiosity like its spiritual predecessors PDP-4/5/7/8/9.
> 
> I also have a mental model of a PDP-11 but these days it's more a simplified 386
> leaving out the dumb or useless stuff.  

I took a look at x86 in 386/486 days and found it to be enough of a mess that
I stopped looking.  In no way did it compare the simplicity and elegance 
of the PDP-11.  I had a TA, Ken Witte, who could read octal dumps of PDP-11
assembly like it was C.  I'm pretty sure the way the instructions were
encoded was a big part of what made that possible.
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Larry McVoy           Retired to fishing          http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/boat