6 Jul
2024
6 Jul
'24
3:49 a.m.
On Fri, Jul 05, 2024 at 05:38:03PM -0400, John Levine wrote:
It appears that Peter Yardley
<peter.martin.yardley(a)gmail.com> said:
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
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.