17 Apr
2006
17 Apr
'06
10:05 a.m.
Chuck Guzis wrote:
My quip about "rephrasing" was of the
statement:
">It was so primitive that instructions longer than 1 byte, had to be
ROTFLMFAO!
When I was developing Z80-based products, an ongoing *battle*
was the use of hex vs. "split octal" (e.g., 0xFFFF -> 0377 0377).
The octal camp claimed the Z80 was an "octal machine" (oh, really?)
and, for "proof", showed how so many of the opcodes could be
committed to memory just my noting the source & destination
register "codes" and packing them into an octal representation:
xx xxx xxx (of course, I wonder how well their argument would
stand up if Zilog had opted to encode the register fields
as: xs dds dsx?? :> )
Octal? Hex? Just give me a symbolic debugger and let *it*
keep track of these minutae...
Ah for the days of toggling in bootstrap loaders with front
panel switches.. :-/ (at least bigger machines treated octal
as "real" octal and not this "spilt octal" nonsense...)
--don
assembled as 2 and 3 byte instructions."
I think that the OP meant "2 or 3 1-byte instructions". I'm not doubting
the primitiveness of the assembler being spoken about.
Does anyone remember the conflict between the MITS and IMSAI (actually, the
rest of the world) about using octal vs. hex representations of data? It's
very obvious just by looking at the two systems--the Altair 8800 spaces the
front panel toggles in groups of 3, whereas the IMSAI 8080 color-codes the
switches in groups of 4. I think that the early MITS assembler used octal,
although it's very hard to remember.