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Long shot, but any sources which accounts the "crazy shit" engineers used to do back then?
by truncate 8y ago
Long shot, but any sources which accounts the "crazy shit" engineers used to do back then?
- timonoko 8y agoWell the Apollo Guidance Computer for example had "magic numbers" aka memory addresses where CPU registers were visible. Probably easy task to find jumps to those addresses, if any. Anyways they would have been much faster to execute than "rope memory", good for IO-intense operations like Moon Landings.
- userbinator 8y ago"magic numbers" aka memory addresses where CPU registers were visible Anyone who has done some amount of programming with microcontrollers like the 8051 or the Microchip PIC will not find such things unusual; when everything is integrated into one unit, the difference between a register and a memory location decreases. Of course, if all you've ever known of are the bland RISCs they love to teach in CS courses, then all this is very weird and foreign to you... but it's just a natural consequence of how the hardware was designed. As such, I do recommend glancing around the documentation for actual computers, from 4-bit microcontrollers to 50s and 60s mainframes, to familiarise yourself with the overwhelming diversity of existent computing devices.