13 Apr
1999
13 Apr
'99
8:35 a.m.
Pete Turnbull wrote:
I started on the Z80, then 6502, followed by ARM, 68K,
6809, 8048, PDP11,
MIPS in no particular order. I still like the Z80 and 6502, but the ARM is
one of my favourites. I've never written any serious code for x86, and
what I've seen of the architecture fills me with loathing ;-)
Jerome Fine replies:
I had an OLD 286 back when the 486 was already old. Just for fun,
I re-wrote some PRIME number programs from VMS in FORTRAN
to Turbo C. The most fun was in taking the inner loop routines and
converting to assembler. I learned a lot about the x86 architecture.
While at least I had a lot more memory immediately available to
save the tables (about 400 Kbytes - much more than on the PDP-11)
the addressing reminded me a bit of the old CDC 6600. I agree
that the old x86 memory usage is very bad for sizes more than
64 KBytes, but I seem to get the impression that under the 32 bit
memory map on the 586 machines (I have not done ANY programming,
so I am probably wrong) when in W95/98, there is a substantial address
space available. Am I wrong?
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
RT-11/TSX-PLUS User/Addict