modern stuff

[Jim Manley]

One of my postgraduate school CS professors worked on the iAPX 432 and his
tidbit about the history of its development was that, whenever the EEs were
confronted with a hardware-level problem by the CSs, the EEs would
universally respond with, "Oh, well, that can be fixed by you software guys
with a SMOP (small matter of programming).", in the microcode, and Intel's
reference assembler, linker, and compilers.

Obviously, he returned to academia before the project collapsed in a heap,
and he might have had to scramble and compete with other departing CS PhDs
(who would also have hung around too long).  Many would probably be looking
at another job where microprocessor microcode, assembler, linker, compiler,
and system-level library development experience would have been highly
desirable, and perhaps where the EEs were more reasonable.  Plus, he didn't
have to put "Served on what became the sunken shipwreck iAPX 432" on his
resume/CV.  That's because it wasn't yet at the Sixth Phase in the Six
Phases of a Project, "Punishment of the Innocent, and Rewards for the
Non-Participants".


On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 6:35 PM Eric Smith via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, Oct 24, 2018, 17:45 ben via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> > On 10/24/2018 3:58 PM, Eric Smith wrote:
> > > On Wed, Oct 24, 2018 at 2:18 PM ben via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org
> > > <mailto:cctalk at classiccmp.org>> wrote:
> > >
> > >     Well I can still run DOS BOX and get my nice 8086 instruction set.
> > >
> > >
> > > I've heard many different adjectives used with regard to the 8086
> > > instruction set, but this is the first time I've heard it described as
> > > "nice".
> > >
> > > Admittedly there are worse ones.
> > >
> >
> > What about Intel's forgotten object oriented kitchen sink processor.
> > IAPX-432 better or worse?
> >
>
> I wouldn't call it a "kitchen sink processor"; some of it's problems are
> actually with things that are missing. However, it's a VCISC, and the
> instruction set isn't really comparable to anything else.
>
> If I had to design a computer for either general-purpose or embedded use,
> I'd definitely choose 8086 over iAPX 432, but that isn't because I consider
> the 8086 instruction set to be particularly good.
>