Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!MATHOM.GANDALF.CS.CMU.EDU!lindsay From: lindsay@MATHOM.GANDALF.CS.CMU.EDU (Donald Lindsay) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: DECsystem-20 (sort of...) Message-ID: <5820@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 10 Aug 89 17:43:53 GMT References: <2679@phred.UUCP> <24933@tau.mips.COM> <3151@blake.acs.washington.edu> Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 22 In article <3151@blake.acs.washington.edu> mrc@Tomobiki-Cho.CAC.Washington.EDU (Mark Crispin) writes: >>(Remember the TRON instruction? Remember the movie? >On a PDP-10, TRON (Test Right half of register with immediate, set masked >bits to Ones, and skip if any masked bits were Non-zero) is opcode 666! I always assumed that the movie was named from the command menu of Microsoft Basic, which was available then. TRON stood for trace-on, which fits with the plot. (The TRON program was intended to clean up the system.) While we're on the subject of instructions ... my all time favorite was on the CDC Star-100. It was a truism of the day that one-pass compilers spent more time in "get next lex character" than in any other place. The Star project was operated in a "ask and you will receive" mode. Well, the Star had memory mapped files .. and a microcoded character pipe .. so, someone asked ... Yup. An instruction which took a character vector of Fortran source, and returned a vector with comments removed, unquoted blanks removed, and continuation lines concatenated. -- Don D.C.Lindsay Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science