On Sat, 5 May 2007, Fred Cisin wrote: I took an IBM PC assembly class from one George Driver who said that he was tired of mediocre texts on assembly, so he wrote his own. I still have it and highly recommend it. I thought it wasn't very widely used, but then I found this page: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?&isbn=0314010408&nsa=1 Amazon has several copies as well. -- David Griffith dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?

I've taught PC Assembly Language using Abel. It was reasonably good, but did not provide enough hand-holding for beginners who are still struggling with "what is a program?", and what the assembler, linker, exe2bin, etc. are. For beginners, I prefer to start with Lafore (Waite group) and then switch books once they can put their name on the screen, count, etc. -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com http://merritt.edu/~fcisin/CIS20.html

On Sat, 2007-05-05 at 12:47 -0700, Chris M wrote: There's no reason why it should be, though. You could come up with some hypothetical BCD-based architecture. Gordon

---snip--- Hi Although, not a machine like Fred, my first assembly was for the 6800 and then for the 8048. Neither of these programs ever got a chance to actually run. My first actual assembly code that ran on something was in a Poly88. After that I was exposed to a MDS800 and other languages. Dwight _________________________________________________________________ Download Messenger. Join the i?m Initiative. Help make a difference today. http://im.live.com/messenger/im/home/?source=TAGHM_APR07

In article <463C5380.25730.222A5959 at cclist.sydex.com>, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes: I tried that with x86 and while the IA-32 documentation is the ultimate reference, its not very good for learning. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

--- Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: I've heard that later editions weren't as good (???). This is why I specifically recommend the first or early editions (I only have experience with the very first edition - IBM PC Assembler (not Assembly) Language and Programming. By the price, that is a very recent edition. Maybe the later editions *try* to tie assembler into a Win32 environment. Maybe he didn't do as good a job as he did introducing the subject in a plain old DOS environment. Possibly this reviewer was entirely new to programming. I am of the persuasion that assembler could be used to teach rudimentary programming concepts, and in fact may be more useful in the long run (kind of like the reason they persuaded me to take Latin in my first year of high school, all the other Romantic languages would come easier. No further comments at this time though...). Maybe I'm quirkier then the typical rube, dunno. Could it be said I'm smarter...LOL LOL I'll answer that myself. No freaking way! I actually did take a course subsequent to teaching myself the subject (?). Assembly language typically blows people away. I remember this one lady (~30 yoa) complaining that she didn't have a clue what was going on, yet scored 95's and such on the tests! The teacher sort of droned I'll admit, but this one older fella (read gray all the way) was doing an absolute stellar job of picking up the material. The kids don't have a monopoly on this stuff, I don't care what anyone says. Uh, well, if you're learning assembler from the get go from tech refs, you're a better man then me. I know that's precisely how many gurus did it, but us kids tended to be lazier or what have you. ____________________________________________________________________________________ It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/

In article <463C9ECC.16427.23507AFE at cclist.sydex.com>, "Chuck Guzis" <cclist at sydex.com> writes: Au contraire. "Architecture" these days is whatever you want it to be cooked into an FPGA. Maybe you don't consider that architecture, but the hardware possibilities available to you for low cost these days are limited only by your imagination and gate count. Of course there's a trade-off between speed and versatility but FPGA designs are *very* popular for custom architectures these days. I've also read this book trying to learn assembly. The problem with the "folksy style" is that it just takes up too much time and space being folksy and not enough time and space covering the details. IMO this book isn't worth buying. Fortunately I spent very little money on it by purchasing it as a remainder. -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>

Nice question...any "big iron" implementation in FPGA? S/360? S/370? PDP? VAX? Whatever?

On 5/5/07, Alexandre Souza <alexandre-listas at e-secure.com.br> wrote: As far as I know, PDP11-44 is in FPGA. It runs Unix-V6. It is implemented by a female graduate student. As far as I know, No VAX is in FPGA. vax, 9000

On 5 May 2007 at 22:06, Richard wrote: SIgh. Whatever. Cheers, Chuck

On Saturday 05 May 2007 21:02, Richard wrote: Sure, but no one (in their right mind) builds a general purpose CPU out of them. Well, unless it's a research or "toy" project, a prototype design, or something very unusual and high end[1], but even in that case it's still not making a general purpose CPU out of it. You normally take an FPGA board, program your specific algorithm into it (that is, convert the algorithm into hardware baseically), and shove bits through it. Have you actually used a FPGA board? I've actually taken a workshop (a few years ago now) on them. Everyone that I know who's using FPGAs in their product (in any sort of manner that approximates a CPU) uses them as some sort of co-processor to offload a specific processing task from the main CPU. I challenge you to come up with the name of a single product that someone can purchase right now, which uses an FPGA-implemented CPU, which is general-purpose, and reasonably widely available. [1] I'm specifically referring to a NAS box we just got at work. MMmmm, NFS in hardare... see http://bluearc.com/ Pat -- Purdue University ITAP/RCAC --- http://www.rcac.purdue.edu/ The Computer Refuge --- http://computer-refuge.org

"Chuck Guzis" wrote: I can't name a general purpose one, but I can name a number of application specific embedded systems which you can buy right now (if you have a big checkbook :-) which have fpga-implemented cpu's. I'm working on two different ones right now. but that probably was your point. I just wanted to point out that they do exist and people do program them, but it's not a generalist thing. -brad

On 6 May 2007 at 15:39, Patrick Finnegan wrote: Anent that, in EETimes about a week ago, Clive Maxfield wrote about a movement to implement decimal floating point for the financial folks-- implemented in FPGA as a coprocessor. http://www.pldesignline.com/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KACYJ2NGXHOEI QSNDLRCKHSCJUNN2JVN?articleID=199001229 I'm not certain if the representation is BCD or DPD, however. Cheers, Chuck

In article <200705061154.07789.pat at computer-refuge.org>, Patrick Finnegan <pat at computer-refuge.org> writes: Right, if you want a general purpose CPU, you buy one. If you need a different architecture, then your architecture isn't one for a general purpose CPU, but a special purpose CPU. You can build that in an FPGA if that's what you need. Really, I don't see what the complaint is here. It seems to be akin to saying "ya know, back in the old days when we hand-made nails, each nail was different. Each nail had character. I don't like these mass-manufactured nails, they're all so identical." Yep. What would be the point of that? Obviously such things don't exist exactly for the same reasons I just stated above. If "architecture" is just different, but not better, then what's the point? The protestations seem to be that the marketplace has settled on a few general purpose CPU designs. Well boo-f*cking-hoo. Again, so what? -- "The Direct3D Graphics Pipeline" -- DirectX 9 draft available for download <http://www.xmission.com/~legalize/book/download/index.html> Legalize Adulthood! <http://blogs.xmission.com/legalize/>