6 Jul
2024
6 Jul
'24
4:08 a.m.
On 7/5/2024 4:49 PM, Larry McVoy wrote:
On Fri, Jul 05, 2024 at 05:38:03PM -0400, John Levine
wrote:
Assuming you mean the same Kendall Witte that spearheaded Dell SVR4
(https://notes.technologists.com/notes/2008/01/10/a-brief-history-of-dell-un…)
he is quite fluent in X86 as well. After Dell SVR4 he became prominent
in Dell firmware work. I saw him just over a year ago at a gathering of
Dell "old timers".
--
voice: +1.512.784.7526 e-mail: sauer(a)technologists.com
fax: +1.512.346.5240 Web: https://technologists.com/sauer/
Facebook/Google/LinkedIn/Twitter: CharlesHSauer
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. 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.