[HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI

[mark at wickensonline.co.uk]

Very interesting Thomas, thanks for sharing.

 

You can of course program an Alpha using VAX Macro-32, as a compiled language, if that is your kind of thing.

 

Regards, Mark

 

From: owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE <owner-hecnet at Update.UU.SE> On Behalf Of Thomas DeBellis
Sent: 22 April 2020 23:59
To: hecnet at Update.UU.SE
Subject: Re: [HECnet] Apparently good news from VSI

 

Why, indeed.  I think after you've programmed enough assembler, you find things to like and detest about all of them.  So I've done BAL-360, PDP-10, PDP-11, PDP-8, Intel 80286 and up as well as VAX and Alpha.  There were others.  Which one did I like most?  Why, the ones I got paid to work on, of course.

After that, what mattered was how friendly the development environment was and in that regard, the 360 really drove me crazy; very poor non-interactive debugging tools (at the time).  The PDP-10's debugger was wonderful as well as the instruction set and a reasonable amount of registers.  The PDP-8 mimicked that to a certain extent, so the fact that there is only one accumulator presented an interesting challenge.  Ditto my experience with the 11.  I honestly don't remember enough VAX assembler to comment meaningfully on it.

Passing to the Intel chips, I would really say it mattered what development tools you used.  Microsoft's show the Macro-10 heritage and the Codeview debugger was completely reasonable.  There were a number of things that bothered me, but the register file wasn't one of them; not after the PDP-8.  The segmented memory model never bothered me at all; not when it offered half a gigabyte of virtual address space on the 286 (2**13 selectors * 64K).  As a matter of fact, I thought it was great because it gave more granularity than guard pages, which is all you can use on the VAX, Alpha and PDP-10.

But really, only a real nerd (like me) would care about any of this.  Otherwise, you really can't tell; not in most high level languages.  And I think Linus probably said it best when he noted that the Intel chips were so fast that register scheduling really didn't matter.  It's true, particularly because behind the curtain it's doing register score-boarding.

You might want to check out AMD's 64 bit extensions to the 80x86 ISA; I've taught that assembler and it's quite reasonable, particularly if you are not using the arcane AT&T syntax: 16 registers and more flexibility in using them; very close to the VAX and PDP-10.  I miss PushA, though.  Or maybe I like x86-64 because I got paid to use it.

Really, Paul; this is a matter of personal taste more than anything else--I don't think it's possible to decide anything more than what you like...

  _____  

On 4/22/20 9:44 AM, Paul Koning wrote:
 
I can see an Alpha, but why would you want a wacko architecture created by Intel?  It's not as if they have any track record of designing nice CPU architectures.
 
  paul

  _____  

On Apr 22, 2020, at 9:30 AM, Keith Halewood  <mailto:Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> <Keith.Halewood at pitbulluk.org> wrote:
 
I might actually go out and buy a cheap alpha or itanic at some point now….. if such things exist.
 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.sonic.net/pipermail/hecnet-list/attachments/20200423/3559475e/attachment.html>