1 Jan
2009
1 Jan
'09
10:46 p.m.
Chuck wrote:
On 1 Jan 2009 at 9:51, Rick Bensene wrote:
What about, say, a Western Digital Microengine? It's a LSI-11 chipset
but with different microcode to interpret P-code which by definition
means UCSD Pascal, so in every real respect a language-specific processor
in a way that a PDP-11/03 isn't.
It's not like people just popped in different MICROM chips to go from
a PDP-11/03 to a Microengine to a Alpha Micro WD16. At least, nobody
I knew did. I've had Alpha Micros and Microengines and 11/03's at different
times through the years and while it's obvious they all have WD chips
I never did have the inkling to go muck about with the MICROM's.
I doubt a 11/03 with a WCS would be enough to "become" a Alpha Micro
or a Microengine. I always did my WCS stuff within the context
of the -11 register set, for example. Maybe I was just restrictively
unclever at the time.
Tim.
Yes, the Wang 2200-series machines used a
microcoded architecture that
implemented a BASIC interpreter as a native "language".
Like an IBM 5150 without any disks? If we're talking about
"directly executing" shouldn't the hardware be so tightly wound up
with the language that reprogramming it (say, by replacing ROMs) to
host some other language is impossible? Otherwise, it's just a
conventional processor executing a stored program.