PDP-10

On 9/27/2012 11:51 AM, Dave McGuire wrote: I talked with a friend who was a designer for Astrodata in the mid 60's. There was a fellow there who would design hardware with the intent of programming the sequencing and so forth later. That was frowned upon at the time and later banned. He left to work at one of the early computer system companies here in Orange County, Varian or such, don't recall. The distinction I would place is whether the hardware can be made to behave differently with either mechanical programming at assembly time, as this fellow did, or with changes to a load of code that is easily alterable in the factory or field. I would argue that even if there are sequencers such as Xilinx parts that have to be loaded at power on time, if they are loaded by parts not easily programmable in the field, then hardware discipline applies, more than software / firmware. Such things as the vhdl and such still may be easily alterable, but are much closer to this sort of firmware than it is to any firmware type function, where the firmware can be loaded and altered to run differently to suit a particular need of a machine.