yet another pdp-8 in a fpga, but this time running tss/8

Johnny Billquist wrote: And why was the PDP-8 not dog slow doing simple things like editing text files? Because people wrote software *carefully* back then. They didn't code as if the CPU were infinitely fast; they didn't use any more instructions than were absolutely necessary. Sure, the processor executed well under a million instructions per second, rather than billions of instructions per second of modern processors. And that's only instructions that operate on 12-bit data, rather than 32-bit or 64-bit today. But writing a character to the system console via a handler in the operating system only required executing a few dozen instructions on a PDP-8, versus executing thousands of instructions today. I just checked on my Linux x86_64 system, and on average writing a character to the console requires executing over six thousand instructions. Eric -- And in those days many a clever programmer derived an immense intellectual satisfaction from the cunning tricks by means of which he contrived to squeeze the impossible into the constraints of his equipment. --- Edsger W. Dijkstra, "The Humble Programmer", 1972 ACM Turing Award Lecture