slick bits in computers (WAS: VAXen Rule!)

On 8/9/2006 at 5:03 PM Dave McGuire wrote: I had a blast with the CDC STAR-100. Instructions to do almost any thing you could conceive of an instruction to do. A single instruction to do a character substring search, with both masks and "near miss" operands. BCD arithmetic up to 64K digits. Sparse vectors, 256 64-bit registers...a veritable smorgasbord of instructions, some of which I didn't have the faintest idea of what they might be good for. Did I mention bit-addressability in the case of bit vectors? I once wrote a line editor for use over slow-speed comm lines whose innards consisted of mostly vector instructions. Input and output files were mapped into the 64-bit address space (that's right--other than the file open and close, there are no system I/O calls). Much to my surprise, I found the same editor being used by the ETA personnel 10 years later. I didn't know whether to be pleased or depressed that nothing better had been developed. Given the very slow speed of scalar instructions, you had to be pretty clever to vectorize as much of the code as you could. Serquential vector searches were fastest for most small (< 1000) lists, as was selection sort. The 100A killed off a lot of the more esoteric instructions, sadly--and it was much less fun. Cheers, Chuck