9 Aug
2006
9 Aug
'06
4:08 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great Dave McGuire once stated:
Scott Quinn wrote:
The Motorola 68k series did something like that. Not every device, but
there was a method of extending the instruction set through external devices
mapped to certain addresses in "CPU" space. Similar I'm guessing.
-spc (I always liked the 68k architecture)
The second part was the general question, which I
guess was a bit too specific. What computers have you come across that are
really neat and why. OK.- System/3{60,70,90,z} is neat for it's processor instruction
set, PERQs for the user-microcode.
SGI Origin 2000's are neat for their CRAYlink/NUMAlink interconnect system, AXPs for
the PALcode idea (sort of a takeoff of the PERQ).
If you saw a computer that has a serial port implementation that is so elegant that it
struck you as a thing of beauty throw that in ...
I'm just interested in getting a feel for what's out there that members feel is
neat. I was kind of thinking hardware to start with,
but it could be extended to software.
I like the fact that, from the programmer's perspective, plugging
boards into a PDP-8 essentially adds device-specific instructions to the
CPU. I don't think it's the cleanest or most elegant way of doing
things, but I like how different (from today's stuff) it is, and I think
it's clever.