26 Oct
2010
26 Oct
'10
11:39 p.m.
On 2010-10-27 06:20, William Donzelli<wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
I honestly don't know.
The PDP-11 have been attributed with the common I/O and memory bus
(Unibus), with memory mapped I/O as well as the concept of condition
codes. Also the general registers with a nice set of addressing modes to
use on them. And we should probably not forget having the PC as just a
general register (although few, if any, picked that one up). So the
PDP-11 can be used as a accumulator-based machine, a memory-memory based
machine, or a stack based machine. It's possible to implement all
concepts found in architectures at that time easily on the PDP-11.
The basic PDP-11 architecture was deigned so that if an instruction took
an argument, any kind of argument was equally valid.
But as usual, the question is: was really the PDP-11 first with these
things, or can you find earlier examples?
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
> 1.>
The PDP-11 was in architectural ways more important than the VAX, if
> ?> nothing else than just because the VAX was basically just extending the
> ?> PDP-11.
Just to throw another question into the fire:
Just how important was the PDP-11 or VAX-11/780 hardware architecture
in the grand scheme of things? Did either machine really bring
anything new to the table?