28 Feb
2018
28 Feb
'18
11:35 a.m.
From: Doug Ingraham
Sent: Wednesday, February 28, 2018 9:53 AM
This is a great story! And it probably indicates that
when developing the
Toad-1 this particular diagnostic was never run from an original DEC generated
tape or the Toad-1 would have failed the diagnostic. Alternatively assembling
the diag on the restoration project would have yielded a working multiply.
As it happens, this diagnostic is KI-10 specific, so no recompilation of the
KL-10 diagnostics would have caught it.
In addition, because the XKL-1 CPU was supposed to be identical to the KL-10,
it needed to pass the diagnostics *as provided* for the KL-10.
So is someone going to fix the multiply instruction in
the 20+ year old Toad?
<grin>
Actually, they tried, but because they had stopped using the Toad-1 several
years earlier (and donated all the remaining spare parts to the museum), they
had no way to test in-house, and limited cycles for developing a fix. If we
ever need to recompile diagnostics for the KI-10 (or, mirabile dictu, a KA-10!)
we'll use a Toad-2.
Rich