MIPS I-IV instruction set standards

[Eric Smith]

On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 11:59 PM, Angelo Papenhoff via cctalk <
cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> I'm wondering where the MIPS I-IV standards that are referenced
> everywhere are defined. I was able to actually find what seems to be the
> IV standard [1] but found no such thing for I-III. I didn't even find
> any bibliographic references to them. Did they only exist as printed
> books and nobody bothered to scan them? Or are they under copyright?
>

AFAIK, there weren't any formal MIPS architecture standards published for
the early versions of the architecture, though there may have been such
things internally to MIPS. That was not an uncommon practice for computer
architectures; for instance, the formal DEC VAX architecture standard was a
DEC confidential document not available to customers, even though there was
plenty of customer documentation covering most aspects of the architecture.

It might be worth asking on comp.arch.