Intel 3000 series

As Allison says, some other controller would be a lot easier to deal with. The 3000 controller was intended for speed. I knew the fellow that wrote the code for the M2FM controller while at Intel ( Lou Bolardo sp? ). He was not my kind of person ( we never got along ) but he was one of the smartest people I have ever met. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org> on behalf of allison via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 7:40:18 PM To: cctalk at classiccmp.org Subject: Re: Intel 3000 series On 05/04/2018 09:16 PM, dwight via cctalk wrote: There seems to be the presumption the bit slices have a uniform organization like a micro. They generally don not. The opcodes and micro code are assigned and created by the developer and their minions along the lines of some architecture they wish to create. they tend to have a pattern and thats about it. The 2900 has an address controller if you used the 2910 or 2911, no rule says you must. Random logic an be used. The 3000 series was very similar only 2 bits wide. I haven't seen one of 40 years but likely have the book somewhere. I think the only thing I've seen them in was the MDS-800 Disks system (the DD one). They all (don't forget the 6300 series) are similar, an alu not unlike the 74181, some glue and muxes for bus organization and few (usually 16) registers you can use how you wish, mostly. In the end they are all microprogrammed and the architecture is very fluid well beyond the slice width. Even the order of control bit fields is up to the designer and can even be vertically encoded for systems with narrow microstore. Also depending on which you use the bit assignments, stacks, available temp registers are not identical. I've done that using 74157 muxes and 163 synchronous counters even had conditional micro jumps. Made my own assembler written in Pascal. Never had commercial one available to me. Allison