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