14 Jun
2006
14 Jun
'06
12:53 p.m.
Roy J. Tellason wrote:
On Wednesday 14 June 2006 12:03 pm, Don Y wrote:
Sorry. :-( The things I design are intended for a specific
purpose. Not "general purpose computing" but, rather,
"application specific". E.g., an autopilot for a boat,
a device for testing blood samples, a gas (petrol?) pump,
a slot machine, etc.
So, the designs are tailored to the needs of the *application*
since that is ALL they will ever do. E.g., a slot machine
might have a video display but no "keyboard" -- instead,
dedicated buttons (and a touchpanel overlay) let the user
do *specific* things; "receipt printers" instead of general
purpose printers; hoppers (for coin payouts) instead of
disk drives, etc.
I think once the 2901 "fell from grace"
(?), this became a thing
of the past. I've designed two processors "from scratch" (TTL
with bipolar ROMs for the microcode store) and found it quite
an interesting exercise. Not just the "logic design" but
actually thinking about what the instruction set should be
for that particular application domain, etc.
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean when you say "application domain"
here? I suspect that this is probably a rather obvious thing to some of the
folks in here who are more familiar than I am with regard to older hardware
that I have no experience with, where that hardware was more specialized in
terms of what it was intended for...