4 ms·

Also, is the name Scamp inspired by this old Scottish made electric car? https://www.scotsman.com/regions/glasgow-and-strathclyde/scotlands-forgotten-car-scamp

by jp0d 5y ago

Also, is the name Scamp inspired by this old Scottish made electric car? https://www.scotsman.com/regions/glasgow-and-strathclyde/scotlands-forgotten-car-scamp-1490176 https://www.scotsman.com/regions/glasgow-and-strathclyde/sco...

the_third_wave 5y ago
The name 'scamp' has been used by another CPU, National Semiconductor's SC/MP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_SC/MP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_SC/MP National Semiconductor's INS8060, or SC/MP (pronounced scamp) for Simple Cost-effective Micro Processor, is an early microprocessor which became available in April 1976. A unique feature of the SC/MP is a daisy-chained control pin that allowed up to three SC/MP's share a single main memory to produce a multiprocessor system. To lower cost, the system used a bit-serial arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and was thus significantly slower than contemporary designs which had parallel ALUs like the Intel 8080 or MOS 6502. Another oddity was that the program counter could only access the lower 12-bits of the 16-bit address, and the upper 4-bits had to be set using special instructions. The result was that instructions accessed main memory as sixteen 4 kB "pages".[a] The combination of slow speed and paged memory limited its attractiveness, especially in the markets that might need a multiprocessing system.
- EvanAnderson 5y ago
  There's another chip w/ the SCAMP name, too. Unisys did a version of their "Series A" mainframe (which has a lineage back to thr Burroughs "large systems" of the 1960s) called SCAMP: http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/unisysaseries http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/unisysas... I worked in an environment that had one of these. The host system was a Pentium Pro server that booted Windows NT and hosted a Series A instance using this chip.
  - jecel 5y ago
    There was also the IBM SCAMP, which evolved into their commercial 5100 computer: https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_334628 https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_334628
jstanley 5y ago
I just like the name. It's kind of a backronym for "Simple Computing and Arithmetic Microcoded Processor".

by jp0d 5y ago

the_third_wave 5y ago

The name 'scamp' has been used by another CPU, National Semiconductor's SC/MP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_SC/MP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Semiconductor_SC/MP National Semiconductor's INS8060, or SC/MP (pronounced scamp) for Simple Cost-effective Micro Processor, is an early microprocessor which became available in April 1976. A unique feature of the SC/MP is a daisy-chained control pin that allowed up to three SC/MP's share a single main memory to produce a multiprocessor system. To lower cost, the system used a bit-serial arithmetic logic unit (ALU) and was thus significantly slower than contemporary designs which had parallel ALUs like the Intel 8080 or MOS 6502. Another oddity was that the program counter could only access the lower 12-bits of the 16-bit address, and the upper 4-bits had to be set using special instructions. The result was that instructions accessed main memory as sixteen 4 kB "pages".[a] The combination of slow speed and paged memory limited its attractiveness, especially in the markets that might need a multiprocessing system.

EvanAnderson 5y ago
There's another chip w/ the SCAMP name, too. Unisys did a version of their "Series A" mainframe (which has a lineage back to thr Burroughs "large systems" of the 1960s) called SCAMP: http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/unisysaseries http://www.retrocomputingtasmania.com/home/projects/unisysas... I worked in an environment that had one of these. The host system was a Pentium Pro server that booted Windows NT and hosted a Series A instance using this chip.
- jecel 5y ago
  There was also the IBM SCAMP, which evolved into their commercial 5100 computer: https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_334628 https://www.si.edu/object/nmah_334628

jstanley 5y ago

I just like the name. It's kind of a backronym for "Simple Computing and Arithmetic Microcoded Processor".