3 ms·
3rd that! Only assembly language I ever enjoyed. So uniform, it just made sense. You could look at it and guess what those instructions were doing and you'd
by luckydude 9y ago
3rd that! Only assembly language I ever enjoyed. So uniform, it just made sense. You could look at it and guess what those instructions were doing and you'd probably be right.
And the instructions in octal actually made sense as well, they were laid out such you could follow an octal dump. Well, my TA for that course, Ken Witte, could. I have memories of him coming over for a beer and reading my octal core dump and pointing to the string of numbers and saying "right here is where you went wrong". Smart dude, I never got that good, I could puzzle through the dumps but it was work; he could read them like assembler.
I believe that only worked because DEC laid out the instructions, the numbers themselves, in a uniform way. Not positive but I think they used 3 octal digits and the middle one was like load or store and the leading/trailing ones modified how/what was being loaded/stored. I'd have to go look it up to be sure, but there was something like that, might be different than I said it, but it was laid out in a sensible way in the actual numbers so you could read them easier.
Really fun machine. I think the only 32 bit machine that came close was Nationals 32032 but they never seemed to be able to produce a bug free chip. Too bad, that one was pleasant too.