It is my understanding - from conversations with numerous IBM engineers and
retirees - that ALDs are 'as-built' documents related to a particular
machine and were indeed kept with the machine at the customer site.
Otherwise, the poor CE would have to haul around a rack of ALDs for each
machine being serviced! It's easy to underestimate the physical bulk of
these documents when printed and in binders. -- Ian
On Tue, Jul 12, 2016 at 7:30 AM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
On Jul 12, 2016, at 6:00 AM, Paul Birkel
<pbirkel at gmail.com> wrote:
Principles of Operation, I believe. Example:
http://bitsavers.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0
_360PrincOps.pdf
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk [mailto:cctalk-bounces at
classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Curious
Marc
Sent: Tuesday, July 12, 2016 5:04 AM
To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts
Subject: Re: IBM 360/30 in verilog
What's a POP? As long as it emulates all the registers connected to light
and switches that might do for me, but I was assuming these would very
specific to the CPU detailed innards.
Marc
> On Jul 12, 2016, at 5:14 PM, Dave Wade <dave.g4ugm at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> It actually might be easier to produce a generic S/360 clone in FPGA
> using the POP rather than individual ALU's.
> Having built a very simple CPU (in VHDL not Verilog) and planning to
> start on a more complex (Ferranti Pegasus) Of course it wouldn't be
> cycle accurate, but perhaps that wouldn't be important.
It depends on what you're trying to emulate. If you want an instruction
level simulator, sort of a SIMH in silicon, then going from the POP or
analogous documents (processor reference manuals, computer family
architecture manuals such as DEC published for the PDP-11 and VAX) will do
nicely. Such an approach is not going to show you the peculiarities of a
particular implementation, details too deep for the sort of documentation
you're using, let alone implementation bugs.
By way of analogy, if you build a CDC 6000 emulation using that approach,
it won't do the "zero written to memory at PC at deadstart time" property,
because that is nowhere documented or explained in any printed document I
have ever seen. But it's part of the unwritten lore of that machine. If
you build a gate level model from the engineering drawings, you can see it
clearly (and you can readily discover its cause).
Building an accurate model from a POP requires a great deal of
intellectual effort, to understand all the critical details sufficiently to
model them in behavioral models. You can perhaps lift them from existing
software emulators (SIMH, Hercules) and get "close enough". Debugging
would be hard, especially if the documentation isn't quite accurate enough
to allow all the diagnostics to pass.
A gate level model constructed from the engineering drawings is more
cumbersome in certain ways, almost certainly less efficient in FPGA
resources -- but it's much more a mechanical process. If the drawings are
accurate (that's an "if" indeed), then the model will be accurate. The
diagnostics should pass without major effort, serving more as confirmation
tools than as debugging aids.
paul
--
Ian S. King, MSIS, MSCS, Ph.D. Candidate
The Information School <http://ischool.uw.edu>
Dissertation: "Why the Conversation Mattered: Constructing a Sociotechnical
Narrative Through a Design Lens
Archivist, Voices From the Rwanda Tribunal <http://tribunalvoices.org>
Value Sensitive Design Research Lab <http://vsdesign.org>
University of Washington
There is an old Vulcan saying: "Only Nixon could go to China."