24 Jan
2008
24 Jan
'08
6:40 p.m.
Chris Kennedy wrote:
Jim Battle wrote:
Ron Crandall. When I was at BTI (1985-1986) Ron was the only main SW guy.
When I talked with Ron, he said Tom Poulter (founder of BTI, and
previously the product manager of the HP 2000, I believe) still had two
8000s and docs and media. Ron said he'd contact Tom for me, but I never
heard anything back.
A few months back I made contact with the the guy
who was the lead of
the software group at BTI.
Which one? We always seemed to have like four :) Has anyone tried pinging Jimbo to see if he has any
stuff hanging about?
You are over my head. I'm not sure who Jimbo is.
Pity he never implemented Intercal for the 8000. It
could have been a
real competitor for Dragon ;)
In 1986, before the big shutdown, there was an optimizing C compiler
that had been written in house. I'm sure it never made it out the door,
though. I can just imagine:
struct {
unsigned int bleb:5;
unsigned int foo:7;
unsigned int bar:11;
} thing;
...
thing.bar += thing.foo;
That probably would have taken two instructions, as the BTI architecture
allowed specifying an operand such as a bitfield of a word at a given
offset from a base register.
Not that such cases are performance critical.