4 May
2025
4 May
'25
7:36 p.m.
I get that, that a general purpose processor with a particular instruction
set can be made up from TTLs (or vacuum tubes, or water sleuths, or metal
gears, etc), and am familiar with the Datapoint (and it always was odd to
me that Wang called their model the 2200 like the Datapoint 2200; I know
both companies had various models).
But aren't modern ASICs essentially that idea of
software-implemented-in-hardware, mainly for dedicated performance? If
you had "perfected" your software and accepted no code change was
necessary, the coding did exactly whatever it is you needed to do, you can
then commit that to some combination of hardware-logic-gate-stuff (for the
sake of executing it wicked-fast, just as modern specialized crypto-ASICs
do) ? I just had the impression Wang was doing some early form of this,
as they referred to their BASIC as "hard-wired." Or in other words, you
can't point to a single chip and say "there is the Wang BASIC ROM" (but
I'm
speculating, hence the question to try to clarify on their pre-1974 systems)
-Steve
On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 9:33 AM Johan Helsingius via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 03/05/2025 23:18, Steve Lewis via cctalk wrote:
Is anyone out there familiar with the Wang 2200
BASIC? Of about
1973/1974
I worked on them for a couple of years back in the day. Still carry the
trauma.
My question is, was its basically really
"built" using TTL logic/chips?
The system didn't really have a microprocessor (neither did the early
Alto, right?)
So your question isn't really about the BASIC, I guess, but about the
hardware?
I recall that system had many boards, the whole
"CPU" box was external to
the monitor (and in the earliest versions, the power supply was also a
large external box). I can't really fathom creating a BASIC out of raw
TTL, or maybe I'm misunderstanding the approach.
You build up a CPU (and the rest) from TTL, just like before that you
would have built it from discrete transistors or even tubes. All a
microprocessor is is just a bunch of TTL-like MOS logic circuits
(made of metal oxide semiconductor elelements) combined on one chip.
Julf