29 Sep
2010
29 Sep
'10
9:44 a.m.
On all this old school stuff - just in case you think it doesn't matter,
it does. One of the best guys I have here is a guy who did printer
firmware. I had to teach him what a cache was, he had never seen one.
But holy moly does he hold the whole picture in his head. And has
forgotten more about SCM than I'll ever know (we do that stuff,
BitKeeper, etc).
People who understand the hardware are useful. I cringe at what we
call a CS degree these days.
And BTW, if you are one of those old school guys and want a job, hit
me up. We're very picky, we have a ~8 year retention rate, but that's
because we make sure that you will be happy and we will be happy. If
we have one good hire a year I'm ecstatic. Gotta be Bay Area for the
first year though (you can live in my guest house in the redwoods :)
--lm
On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:59:22PM -0400, John Cowan wrote:
On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Larry McVoy
<lm(a)bitmover.com> wrote:
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com
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.
Yeah. I used it on and off, but my serious assembler programming was
on the PDP-8. Now *that* was seriously small, but you had to know the
tricks, like how to find out the absolute address of the 128-word
memory page following the one you are on when writing PIC code for
OS/8 device drivers, or how to microprogram the operate instructions
get interesting constants into the AC.
Come on - has anyone ever seen a better
instruction set? More
complicated, yeah, holy moly, yeah. But cleaner? We owe DEC
for that one.
I remember how appalled I was when I saw the VAX instruction set.
Luckily, it didn't matter: I never did assembler again. Still, trying
to make people think in octal at this late date seems unnecessary.
Personally, I like anyone who can do any
assembler. One of my interview
questions is "have you written swtch?"
/me chuckles.
If you don't get the question you are not
an OS person,
if you are, of course you get it.
Well, I know what it is but I've never written it. There was a bug in
the V6 kernel version anyhow.
Ken Witte - wonder where he is now.
Too many others out there, alas.