17 Apr
2006
17 Apr
'06
1:59 p.m.
On Monday 17 April 2006 01:05 pm, Don Y wrote:
Hehe. I remember that "big controversy", dunno at this point if it was in
some of the magazines or what.
Me, I wish they'd made those common TTL 7-segment decoder/driver chips
display something more like hex when you got into codes past 9...
Does anyone
remember the conflict between the MITS and IMSAI (actually,
the rest of the world) about using octal vs. hex representations of data?
It's very obvious just by looking at the two systems--the Altair 8800
spaces the front panel toggles in groups of 3, whereas the IMSAI 8080
color-codes the switches in groups of 4. I think that the early MITS
assembler used octal, although it's very hard to remember.
ROTFLMFAO!
When I was developing Z80-based products, an ongoing *battle*
was the use of hex vs. "split octal" (e.g., 0xFFFF -> 0377 0377).
The octal camp claimed the Z80 was an "octal machine" (oh, really?)
and, for "proof", showed how so many of the opcodes could be
committed to memory just my noting the source & destination
register "codes" and packing them into an octal representation:
xx xxx xxx (of course, I wonder how well their argument would
stand up if Zilog had opted to encode the register fields
as: xs dds dsx?? :> ) Octal? Hex? Just give me a symbolic debugger and let
*it*
keep track of these minutae...
Indeed.
Ah for the days of toggling in bootstrap loaders with
front
panel switches.. :-/ (at least bigger machines treated octal
as "real" octal and not this "spilt octal" nonsense...)
As did that H11 that I got to type in the boot loader any time I wanted to do
something with it, which I did indeed find exceedingly tedious.
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin