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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