Joe wrote:
Bill,
You're a man after my own heart! I've been thinking about this for some time. I
once had some NICE small core planes (16k I think) out of a HP communications analyzer and
I think they would have been just about perfect for this. I had too many other projects at
the time so I sold them but I know where there are some more analyzers so I may grab them
and swipe the core from them. I found the service manual for the analyzer so I had the
pin out for the entire machine including the core. (I still have it). IIRC the core module
was about 5 inches square and had all the drivers and sense amps on it so that might make
things easier. However there are some things that you have to do with core and I don't
know if they handled in hardware or if the OS had to take care of it. For example, reading
core is destructive, that is it erases the contents so you have to store the contents back
into it before you do anything else (unless you don't care if it's lost). That
seems like it wou!
!
ld be easy enough to do in HW but I don't know if
that's what they did.
Writing back to memory was a hardware function. Clear memory and
Incriment/Decriment memory were often implimented as memory write back
features.
--
Ben Franchuk - Dawn * 12/24 bit cpu *
www.jetnet.ab.ca/users/bfranchuk/index.html