6 May
2007
6 May
'07
4:46 p.m.
On 6 May 2007 at 11:54, Patrick Finnegan wrote:
I challenge you to come up with the name of a single
product that someone
can purchase right now, which uses an FPGA-implemented CPU, which is
general-purpose, and reasonably widely available.
...and that was my point. In the space of, oh, five years, a
programmer might be exposed to systems from IBM with very very
different architectures. Consider the IBM 1401 and 7090, both
introduced in 1959. One a variable-word length decimal machine; the
other a 36-bit fixed-word binary machine. Or another 1959 system,
the 1620, variable-word decimal, but very different from the 1401.
Five years later, we have S/360 that didn't look anything like what
had come before. Not to mention the various other 7000-series iron
(particularly STRETCH), the 1130, 1800...etc. And the those were the
offerings in 5 years from ONE manufacturer.
If one jumped manufacturers, one learned not only a new machine and
assembly language, but a whole new vocabulary to use when talking
about them. In assemblers, contrast 1401 Autocoder with CDC 6000
COMPASS, for example. The feeling that one has just arrived from
Mars is unavoidable.
Cheers,
Chuck