29 Sep
2010
29 Sep
'10
8:59 a.m.
On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Larry McVoy <lm(a)bitmover.com> wrote:
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.