Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!philabs!seismo!rochester!ritcv!mjl From: mjl@ritcv.UUCP Newsgroups: net.arch Subject: Re: uP architecture - (nf) Message-ID: <433@ritcv.UUCP> Date: Tue, 5-Jul-83 14:15:08 EDT Article-I.D.: ritcv.433 Posted: Tue Jul 5 14:15:08 1983 Date-Received: Thu, 7-Jul-83 04:04:53 EDT References: ucbcad.189 Lines: 21 When I was in graduate school, I had a summer job working on a relatively early 8080-based system: an electronic voting machine. It quickly became apparent that though the 8080 was an engineer's dream (at least in 1975), it was a programmer's nigtmare. What was worse, since few of the engineers (at that time, anyhow) had any appreciation of software problems, they would perform nifty circuit design tricks that made such problems as interrupt handling much more difficult. In any event, if you think the 808x series is fun, look up the specs on the old Fairchild F8. Part of my job was to convert the 8080 code to run on the F8. The instruction sets were wildly divergent, the memory was cramped (2K bytes of RAM for all status variables and lever counters), and of course all was in assembly language. Things reached the ultimate in absurdity when I told the chief engineer that most of my problems stemmed from the architectural incompatibility of the two processors. His response: "What do you mean the architectures are incompatible? They're both NMOS!" Waiting for the perfect machine (will it be a RISC)? Mike Lutz {allegra,seismo}!rochester!ritcv!mjl