On 10/18/2011 11:24 AM, Mike Marlow wrote:
Larry Blanchard wrote:
On Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:57:21 -0400, m II wrote:

Yup, Motorola kept reducing the instruction sets down to 27? on the
68000 while Intel kept bragging about the millions of instructions on
it's messy internal architecture. People writing code for Intel hated
it!

Then came along the Z-80 with it's block memory move in one
instruction. Trouble was, that a 6809 with code for a memory move
loop could move the block faster and with less setup instructions
and time.

We all learned the long and hard way.

I always thought the Nat'l Semi 16032 and its relatives had the best
instruction set of the micro chips, but my real favorite was a
mainframe from the '60s, the GE4xx series. Not a lot about it on the
web but a little at:


Mixed thoughts there Larry 0 GE4x was not a microprocessor based machine.


Actually, the first microprocessor on a single chip was the Four-Phase
Systems AL1 chip. It was developed by the Four-Phase founder, Lee
Boysel in 1969. It took a law suit against TI to get it recognized as such.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-Phase_Systems

There were other microprocessor designs around that time, but the AL1
was the first actually produced.




--
"A man can fail many times, but he isn't a failure until he begins to
blame somebody else." -John Burroughs