20 Sep
2013
20 Sep
'13
8 p.m.
On 9/20/2013 7:43 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
On 9/20/2013 7:12 PM, Brent Hilpert wrote:
And now that I read up more on it, I'm pretty sure that my memory of it
being BASIC was faulty, and that the SYMBOL was what I was thinking of
the entire time. Here's a bit of info on it:
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/gbell/computer_structures_pri…
Only one was builtand it was used at Iowa State. From the cctalk
archives, it looks like the CHM has whatever remains of it.
- Josh
On 2013 Sep 20, at 5:57 PM, Josh Dersch wrote:
I recall it being a one-off, experimental sort of thing from the late
60's (where the thesis was something like "compilers and interpreters
are reallyinefficient and will never be as good as machine code, but
what if we did it in /hardware/, well, then...magic.").
I did find a reference to the Fairchild SYMBOL, which seems to be sort
of what I'm describing, but I still don't think it's what I was
originally remembering...
- Josh So Iwas taking a closer look at the HP 1351A
"Graphics Generator" I
have. It's currently in operable condition, except that it won't
draw text (apparently there's something wrong with the character
generator, the :TX commands do nothing at all). I was surprised to
discover that the 1351 (c. 1981) doesn't containa microprocessor or
microcontroller of any kind -- all parsing of the command language
it supports is done in hardware (TTL). (The service manual contains
this gem: "The 1351A only accepts commands listed in this manual and
in the Operating and Programming manual. Any others, especially
those mentioned above will 'lock up' the 1351A such that it will
have to be re-initialized...")
At any rate, this reminded me of something that I'm prettysure I
read here on cctalk years back, but I can't seem to find any
reference toit anywhere; there was a computer designed at some
university that ran an interpreted language (I'm pretty sure it was
BASIC), on the metal-- that is, much like the 1351A and its vector
description language, this machine's hardware parsed BASIC program
text and executed it directly, rather than implementing some machine
language.
Does this ring any bells, or am I insane? (It's quite possible that
both of these things are true...)
Perhaps you're thinking of the Wang 2200, which I'm led to understand
implemented BASIC in microcode; I think it may have been mentioned on
the list a few years ago.