4 ms·
Don't forget the Burroughs B5000, from 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#B5000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#B
by vezzy-fnord 12y ago
Don't forget the Burroughs B5000, from 1961: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#B5000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burroughs_large_systems#B5000
The fact that we had an architecture running entirely on ALGOL with no ASM as far back as 54 years ago, is quite astonishing, followed by depressing.
- Animats 12y agoI know. I once took a computer architecture course from Bill McKeeman at UCSC, and we had an obsolete B5500 to play with. We got to step through instruction execution from the front panel, watching operands push and pop off the stack. The top two locations on the stack were hardware registers to speed things up. An address on the Burroughs machines is a path - something like "Process 22 / function 15 / array 3 / offset 14. The actual memory address is no more visible to the program than an actual disk address is visible in a modern file system. Each of those elements is pageable, and arrays can be grown. The OS controls the memory mapping tree. One of the things that killed those machines was the rise of C and UNIX. C and UNIX assume a flat address space. The Burroughs machines don't support C-style pointers.