On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Sam Ismail <dastar(a)ncal.verio.com> wrote: Subject: Re: TI99: WP and PC ] On Fri, 29 Jan 1999, Allison J Parent wrote: ] > WP... workspace pointer. back when the 9900 was new registers (memory) ] > really ate up chip space and TI had an archetecture in the 990 minicomputer ] > where register were in memory instead of in the CPU. So the WP is a pointer ] > that points to a block of 16 locations in ram that are addressed in ] > instructions as R0 through R15. ] ] Wow! What a cool architecture! That would be a very handy feature to ] have in any processor. Except for a significant penalty in register access time, maybe. Could be worth it if you expected lots of context switches. Sounds to me like the 1802. Is there any shared history between them? Were the 1802 designers consciously influenced by the TI design, or was it derived again from scratch? Hmm, 1802's were used in satellites, right? Do satellite apps need lots of context switching? ] Sellam Alternate e-mail: dastar(a)siconic.com ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ] Always being hassled by the man. ] ] Coming in 1999: Vintage Computer Festival 3.0 ] See http://www.vintage.org/vcf for details! ] [Last web site update: 01/15/99] Cheers, Bill.