"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Also it's convenient for Windows fan to
And Apple are control freaks, there wouldn't be anywhere near the
software applications there are now if Apple had control.

More bull****. One thing that marks Apple out from MS is that Apple provide
a high level of support to developers and Apple give away development tools
and even development environments such as Quartz.

A quick look at Apple's AppSore would show most people who are not complete
****nuggets how well Apple supports developers.

MS are closed source to the extent of not documenting APIs in order to give
MS's own developers an advantage over third parties.

Some may not like M$ but I doubt if the alternatives would have been better.

I doubt if you have a brain. The key difference being that I'm right and
you are wrong.

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do virtual
memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came out that
there was a working MMU to run the protection and coincidently support
paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.


Also it's convenient for Windows fan to
And Apple are control freaks, there wouldn't be anywhere near the
software applications there are now if Apple had control.

More bull****. One thing that marks Apple out from MS is that Apple
provide
a high level of support to developers and Apple give away development
tools
and even development environments such as Quartz.

M$ give away tools too. In fact they probably did it before apple.


A quick look at Apple's AppSore would show most people who are not
complete
****nuggets how well Apple supports developers.

Would that be like app store?
Yes you can have tools but just try publishing anything without apple's say
so.
ControlFreaks"R"us won't like it.


MS are closed source to the extent of not documenting APIs in order to
give
MS's own developers an advantage over third parties.

Rubbish.


Some may not like M$ but I doubt if the alternatives would have been
better.

I doubt if you have a brain. The key difference being that I'm right and
you are wrong.

I hate to tell you this but you are wrong again.

On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:32:44 +0100, Tim Streater
wrote:

In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message

...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do virtual
memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that
Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.
Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came out
that there was a working MMU to run the protection and coincidently
support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.


Didn't the Apple Lisa have virtual memory?

--
Rod

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message

...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do virtual
memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that
Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came out
that there was a working MMU to run the protection and coincidently
support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851 MMU
as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?
Anyway they didn't work very well.

In message , Tim
Streater writes
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message

-september.
org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.
Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter

Yes (having worked on the ACS for the Eurofighter at proposal stage),
the 68020 was the preferred processor for all systems.

Not only was it a superior processor (and more suited to running ADA),
Motorola offered it in a hardened silicon on sapphire version


--
geoff

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.
org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do virtual
memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that
Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came out
that there was a working MMU to run the protection and coincidently
support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would certainly
have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see http://www.clothears.org.uk)
I can state that it's a much better processor than the 8086 ever was. Just
a shame that the 68008 wasn't out in time for IBM to use in the original
PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is the
worst language I have used.

Informix 4GL was quite interesting as was a brief encounter with CHILL.

In message om,
"dennis@home" writes
Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?


It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

Ah you cheated ... you got a computer to join up the dots for you ?

So thats two boards and a PIC

What a busy little life you had



It was much easier.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.


"Hello World" proved a bit too difficult for you, did it?

--
geoff

On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:36:44 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

Unless you wanted data areas 64kB, of course.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

The 80186 was designed to be really easy, so perhaps you might have
managed that.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.

It requires a competent programmer, you see.


--
Use the BIG mirror service in the UK:
http://www.mirrorservice.org

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message


...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do virtual
memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that
Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?
Anyway they didn't work very well.

Oh FFFS.
They worked VERY well and its the HARDWARE that gets the MMU.

Tim Streater wrote:
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the 80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said that
Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't out
in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

+1
Far better chip.

Segmentation was a complete ******* without proper paging 386 was first
DECENT 32 bitter

dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.


That is irrelevant.

What counts is how it could organise memory.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

I wrote my own OS for it. RMX86 was a pile of over complicated turds.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.


Thats because you are a prize ******. I wrote a c library - stdlib - for
mine.


Informix 4GL was quite interesting as was a brief encounter with CHILL.

On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:32:44 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:
Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came out
that there was a working MMU to run the protection and coincidently
support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.

ISTR there being an MMU available for the '010, too, although it was a
bit clunky (and some vendors - e.g. Sun - implemented their own).

Several vendors implemented a kind of "elegant kludge" to do virtual
memory on the humble 68000, too (which lacked the necessary to implement
virtual memory properly) - that involved actually running two CPUs out of
phase with each other.

cheers

Jules

On 25/10/2011 23:14, Tim Streater wrote:
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't out

Yup, can't argue with that, a far more elegant design in every way.

in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.




--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 25/10/2011 23:33, geoff wrote:
In message , Tim
Streater writes
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.
Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter

Yes (having worked on the ACS for the Eurofighter at proposal stage),
the 68020 was the preferred processor for all systems.

Not only was it a superior processor (and more suited to running ADA),
Motorola offered it in a hardened silicon on sapphire version

To be fair Intel do milspec versions of most of their processors. (I
remember playing with a milspec 16MHz 80386 card in 1988 work about £20K
- several K of that was the '386 and '387 chips on their own)


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:54:48 +0100, geoff wrote:
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?

Sheet of paper and a crayon. Oh, and a chewable reference manual.

On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

Segmented architecture, 16 bit registers and not many off them, loads of
hard coded use cases for various registers, weak stack handling, lame
edge sensitive interrupt controllers and prioritisation.

compared with flat memory, 32 registers, orthogonal design etc

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

Than what? PL/M was better than Intel assembler granted (especially if
you had to use Intel's DOS based tools which were bug city). '186
cleared away a few peripheral chips and was favoured by hardware guys
who could not work out how to do address decoding logic that worked, but
the performance was poor in comparison to 68K.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.

If its anything like doing non bit aligned ASN.1 (PER) encoding, then
its a mess regardless of the language! I wrote a set of routines for it
in C which looked ok but were too slow, so recoded in 68K assembler.

Informix 4GL was quite interesting as was a brief encounter with CHILL.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 26/10/2011 00:44, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Tim Streater wrote:
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

+1
Far better chip.

Segmentation was a complete ******* without proper paging 386 was first
DECENT 32 bitter

'286 would have been ok(ish) if it were not for the legacy of PCs and
DOS. You really needed the complexity of the 386 to tame those. The 386'
was the first processor I met where it took 20 mins to acclimatise to
the new assembler, and then months to get a handle all the wrinkles of
the architecture.

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead, or
even the ns32k...

"geoff" wrote in message
...
In message om,
"dennis@home" writes
Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?

What's up geof, ave you not done one then?


It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

Ah you cheated ... you got a computer to join up the dots for you ?

So thats two boards and a PIC

Never done a pic.
More than two boards too.
You wouldn't understand any of them even if you had the contents of the
FPLAs and FPLSs.


What a busy little life you had

Worried that I have done more than you then?
Don't feel bad you can always try harder.

It was much easier.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is the
worst language I have used.


"Hello World" proved a bit too difficult for you, did it?

jealous again geof, why not go and fix some fans, you can get your staff to
show you how.

"Jules Richardson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:54:48 +0100, geoff wrote:
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?

Sheet of paper and a crayon. Oh, and a chewable reference manual.

The reference manuals not much good when it hasn't been written yet.

Or when the devices don't actually do what's in the book because they suffer
from ground bounce inside the package.

Or even have leaky silicon so the bias drifts over time until the device
stops working. Or at least stops working until you power it off and get it
sent back as a faulty unit only for it to be fully functional when you try
and find the problem.

Then there are little things like actually connecting microprocessors to
hardware which are never in the manuals. Just little things like setup and
hold times, the odd race condition, etc. Things geof doesn't even know
exists.

hell, even things nobody knows about and you just have to find it and fix
it.

"Bob Eager" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:36:44 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

Unless you wanted data areas 64kB, of course.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

The 80186 was designed to be really easy, so perhaps you might have
managed that.

The 80186 was no easier than the 8086.
It was an 8086 with a few bits like a DMA controller on board.


The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.

It requires a competent programmer, you see.

Being competent means you can see how bad C is.
Just because it is a widely used language doesn't make it good.
just look at some of the silly constructs that were put in just to make it
easier to compile in a single pass compiler.

"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.
org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't out
in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.


That is irrelevant.

What counts is how it could organise memory.

It just meant you had to understand the hardware, something many programmers
didn't.
Including you it appears.


The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

I wrote my own OS for it. RMX86 was a pile of over complicated turds.

However you could get code libraries for it so you didn't have to write
everything again.
Something important in the real world as it meant you could actually deliver
products on time.


The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is the
worst language I have used.


Thats because you are a prize ******. I wrote a c library - stdlib - for
mine.

So what?
I didn't reinvent the wheel, I wrote original code.
C is crap, and always will be.

Informix 4GL was quite interesting as was a brief encounter with CHILL.

"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...
On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

Segmented architecture, 16 bit registers and not many off them, loads of
hard coded use cases for various registers, weak stack handling, lame edge
sensitive interrupt controllers and prioritisation.

All of which still worked if you knew how to use them.


compared with flat memory, 32 registers, orthogonal design etc

No interrupt controllers for the 68000 (at least not when I was designing
8086 stuff, it was early as they hadn't even done the 8088 then, the PC
hadn't been invented either).
BTW the 8086 instructions were no worse than the 68000, you could do most
things without resorting to the short instructions.


The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

Than what? PL/M was better than Intel assembler granted (especially if you
had to use Intel's DOS based tools which were bug city). '186 cleared away
a few peripheral chips and was favoured by hardware guys who could not
work out how to do address decoding logic that worked, but the performance
was poor in comparison to 68K.

However it was cheap and made quite a nice controller for an X25
communications board.

Jules Richardson wrote:
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 22:32:44 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:
Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came out
that there was a working MMU to run the protection and coincidently
support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.
Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the 68851
MMU as a co-processor with it.

ISTR there being an MMU available for the '010, too, although it was a
bit clunky (and some vendors - e.g. Sun - implemented their own).

Several vendors implemented a kind of "elegant kludge" to do virtual
memory on the humble 68000, too (which lacked the necessary to implement
virtual memory properly) - that involved actually running two CPUs out of
phase with each other.

cheers

Jules

Sun and Apple were very much in bed at one time.

I THINK Sun did a version of appletalk or some such..

Certainly if you were running an apple network, sun wanted to be a
server on it,.

dennis@home wrote:


"Jules Richardson" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 25 Oct 2011 23:54:48 +0100, geoff wrote:
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.

Joined up the dots, did you dennis?

Sheet of paper and a crayon. Oh, and a chewable reference manual.

The reference manuals not much good when it hasn't been written yet.

Or when the devices don't actually do what's in the book because they
suffer from ground bounce inside the package.

Or even have leaky silicon so the bias drifts over time until the device
stops working. Or at least stops working until you power it off and get
it sent back as a faulty unit only for it to be fully functional when
you try and find the problem.

Then there are little things like actually connecting microprocessors to
hardware which are never in the manuals. Just little things like setup
and hold times, the odd race condition, etc. Things geof doesn't even
know exists.

hell, even things nobody knows about and you just have to find it and
fix it.

Oh I can assure you that some of us did, although by that time I was
glad to leave it to the sweaty oiks on the hardware emuls. I had had
enough of hardware by that time, and software paid more.

Was able to put them right a few times though.

John Rumm wrote:
On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.


org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

Segmented architecture, 16 bit registers and not many off them, loads of
hard coded use cases for various registers, weak stack handling, lame
edge sensitive interrupt controllers and prioritisation.

compared with flat memory, 32 registers, orthogonal design etc

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

Than what? PL/M was better than Intel assembler granted (especially if
you had to use Intel's DOS based tools which were bug city). '186
cleared away a few peripheral chips and was favoured by hardware guys
who could not work out how to do address decoding logic that worked, but
the performance was poor in comparison to 68K.

The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.

If its anything like doing non bit aligned ASN.1 (PER) encoding, then
its a mess regardless of the language! I wrote a set of routines for it
in C which looked ok but were too slow, so recoded in 68K assembler.


Did the same on 80*86 ...except that was really down to understanding
the crap compilers.

Informix 4GL was quite interesting as was a brief encounter with CHILL.

Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead, or
even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

Apple went for the 6502 IIRC

I don't think many people used 6809, although it had a simple clean
instruction set, so the 68000 was not anybodies first choice...but I
think it was closer to the 6502 and the woz probably understood memory
mapped I/O better so that was what came next maybe.

I admit I know not a lot about early apples..

dennis@home wrote:


"The Natural Philosopher" wrote in message
...
dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.

org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.


That is irrelevant.

What counts is how it could organise memory.

It just meant you had to understand the hardware, something many
programmers didn't.
Including you it appears.


The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

I wrote my own OS for it. RMX86 was a pile of over complicated turds.

However you could get code libraries for it so you didn't have to write
everything again.
Something important in the real world as it meant you could actually
deliver products on time.


The STREAMS drivers and other C code I wrote was horrible to do, C is
the worst language I have used.


Thats because you are a prize ******. I wrote a c library - stdlib -
for mine.

So what?
I didn't reinvent the wheel, I wrote original code.
C is crap, and always will be.


No dennis, you are crap and always will be.

C is the fastest way to write portable assembler than anyone ever came
up with.

The later compilers compiled it into better assembler than most people
could write.

If you had speed issues you were writing it wrong.

I only used assembler to get very weird things done like microkernel
stack flipping for process context switching. Or to squeeze code into a ROM.

If for no other reason than it would have taken me years to write in
assembler what I wrote in 'C' ..in months...

The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Apple went for the 6502 IIRC

Yes, first three machines I used were all 6502 (PET, UK101, BBC) then I
moved onto Z80 with CP/M, OS/M and MP/M

I don't think many people used 6809, although it had a simple clean
instruction set

later I used 6809 with OS-9 and found it was like coming home to a
grown-up 6502.

On 26/10/2011 02:05, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM

Was? it still is (from a developers point of view).

using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead, or
even the ns32k...

IIUC, the original PC was needed quickly to fulfil what IBM saw as a two
year gap in the market, after which they would have replaced it with a
"proper" solution. Hence they farmed out the design to one of their
research labs at the fringe of the organisation, told them to work fast,
ignore the normal company way of doing things and get a product built
quick. That basically meant taking ready to go designs wherever they
could. So processor and memory architectures straight off Intel data
sheets, disk interface from Shugart ones etc. The only really novel bit
of engineering was hooking it up to one of the famous IBM style
keyboards lifted from a selectric typewriter. (hence why the keyboard
controller chips on PCs carry out a whole bunch of unrelated activities
- it was the only bit being built from scratch, and so where most
missing functionality had to go!)

They wanted a 16 bit architecture, but were particularly attracted to
the 8088 because it looked like an 8 bit design externally. Hence a
cheap memory and bus design. It also had the option of going to proper
16 bit later without having significant any impact on software.

The rest is history...



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 26/10/2011 10:03, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead,
or even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

The 8088 certainly was, since it could share many of the same
peripherals including the 8259 PIC, 8250 UART, 8254 PIT etc.

Apple went for the 6502 IIRC

For their early machines, yup.

I don't think many people used 6809, although it had a simple clean

It made it into a few commercial systems. Tandy Color Computer and
Dragon 32/64 being the most notable.

instruction set, so the 68000 was not anybodies first choice...but I

The fact that the cheap to interface 68008 was not produced until later
probably hindered takeup more than anything, since the external 16 bit
bus width forced use of more expensive memory interfaces etc. (they
probably figured you would use a 6800 chip if you wanted and 8 bit system

think it was closer to the 6502 and the woz probably understood memory
mapped I/O better so that was what came next maybe.

I admit I know not a lot about early apples..


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:03, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead,
or even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

The 8088 certainly was, since it could share many of the same
peripherals including the 8259 PIC, 8250 UART, 8254 PIT etc.


So basically it was Intels smarts that said 'use an 8 bit bus on a 16
bit chip, and you have an unholy kludge of a thing that can churn out
better than a pure 8 bit processor can, today'

Huge wrote:
On 2011-10-26, John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 02:05, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...
I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
Was? it still is (from a developers point of view).

The good news is that I haven't written any assembler since the PDP11, and
when I looked at the '86 out of idle curiousity, it made me nauseous.

These days the horror of the '86 is hidden away several layers below. Hell,
I haven't written any *compiled* code for years, never mind assembler. These
days I do anything complicated in Perl.

I found that anything complicated in PERL took several years to execute.

I do SIMPLE things in PHP, complicated things in C..

On 26/10/2011 08:38, dennis@home wrote:


"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...
On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home wrote:


"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article om,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Tim Streater" wrote in message
...
In article m,
"dennis@home" wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
-september.


org
...
"dennis@home" wrote:
[snip]
If only Apple had allowed the clones to build Macs back in the
80s

yes we would still be stuck with an OS that didn't even do
virtual memory.
Windows did that for years before macOS.

No that's bull****. It would have been accurate had you said
that Windows
had protected memory before MacOS.

Well that's not surprising.. it wasn't until the 68030 series came
out that there was a working MMU to run the protection and
coincidently support paging and VM.
That is true for Motorola CPUs as used by Apple.

Mmmm no (again). The 030 was the first in the 68k line to have an
*on-board* MMU. You could perfectly well use a 68020 and use the
68851 MMU as a co-processor with it.

Which MacOS used one of those?

The later versions of classic MacOS, with virtual memory, would
certainly have run on an 020 Mac with MMU.

Anyway they didn't work very well.

Do you mean the 020? (Used in the TGV and Eurofighter according to
WinkyPedia). Or the MMU.

Well its pretty obvious from what I wrote.
maybe your MMU is also defunked?


Having written a tiny OS for the 68000 (see
http://www.clothears.org.uk) I can state that it's a much better
processor than the 8086 ever was. Just a shame that the 68008 wasn't
out in time for IBM to use in the original PC instead of the 8088.

AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed.
It wasn't any more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

Segmented architecture, 16 bit registers and not many off them, loads
of hard coded use cases for various registers, weak stack handling,
lame edge sensitive interrupt controllers and prioritisation.

All of which still worked if you knew how to use them.

Don't think anyone was claiming they did not work, just that they were
very poor in comparison. Great if you like painting the hall through the
letterbox, but not a way to get a job done effectively.

(you only need look at the dominance of 68K in the embedded market at
the time, to see what people opted for when unconstrained by a need to
be "compatible")

compared with flat memory, 32 registers, orthogonal design etc

No interrupt controllers for the 68000 (at least not when I was

Given it had the ability to deal with three prioritised level sensitive
interrupts without even needing an external controller, this was a very
good thing. With a controller it was far more flexible than the 8086
interrupt system, and without requiring anything like the hideous
complexity introduced by the 8259 and its multitude of obscure modes of
operation.

designing 8086 stuff, it was early as they hadn't even done the 8088
then, the PC hadn't been invented either).
BTW the 8086 instructions were no worse than the 68000, you could do
most things without resorting to the short instructions.

I think your memory must be failing. While it is unrealistic to separate
the instruction set from the architecture anyway (and its that which
makes the 8086 such a dogs breakfast) the instruction sets are not even
comparable. The 68K set allows the programmer to concentrate on
designing code to do the required job, whereas with 8086 you have to
spend fair amount of effort just picking the right registers to use so
you don't have to wast time swapping stuff about when you realise you
need to do a multiply and AX and DX are holding something else, or you
want a loop and happen to have something in CX etc.

The 80186 board I designed was programmed using PL/M and used RMX86.

It was much easier.

Than what? PL/M was better than Intel assembler granted (especially if
you had to use Intel's DOS based tools which were bug city). '186
cleared away a few peripheral chips and was favoured by hardware guys
who could not work out how to do address decoding logic that worked,
but the performance was poor in comparison to 68K.

However it was cheap and made quite a nice controller for an X25
communications board.

They are ok, and indeed I have used them many times (GEC at the time had
a habit of designing intel based embedded systems long after the world
had decamped to motorola). However for any form of comms work the 68302
gives you all the 186 has in terms of embedded peripherals, and
facilities for reducing hardware complexity external to the processor
(chip select and wait state generation etc), but it is in a different
class altogether with a proper three channel communications processor
built in which can transparently handle anything from looking like a bog
standard serial link, to HDLC and various other protocols.


--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 26/10/2011 10:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:03, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't
any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead,
or even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

The 8088 certainly was, since it could share many of the same
peripherals including the 8259 PIC, 8250 UART, 8254 PIT etc.


So basically it was Intels smarts that said 'use an 8 bit bus on a 16
bit chip, and you have an unholy kludge of a thing that can churn out
better than a pure 8 bit processor can, today'

Yes to the first bit, but the kludginess of it meant that even decent
Z80 systems of the day would out perform it in most apps!

--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 26/10/2011 10:47, Huge wrote:
On 2011-10-26, John wrote:
On 26/10/2011 02:05, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM

Was? it still is (from a developers point of view).

The good news is that I haven't written any assembler since the PDP11, and
when I looked at the '86 out of idle curiousity, it made me nauseous.

Well to be fair, its exceedingly rare that one needs to dabble with
assembler... Only had to do it once seriously on '386 stuff and that was
for built in test code on a 386 platform when there were no compilers
capable of generating protected mode code available for it at the time!

Used to routinely do comms stuff in 8086 assembler when writing the main
app in Turbo Pascal 3[1] - but that was because the language at that
version lacked the ability to do interrupt handling etc. Once version 4
or 5 became available that was no longer needed.

[1] Ah, the fond memories, an astoundingly fast and good compiler,
editor, and run time environment that all fitted in 50K on a floppy!

The number of times I have actually needed to code in assembler for
performance reasons, can probably be counted on two fingers in the last
twenty years! Once was the bitstream coding stuff on a system with very
tight and had real time limits. The other was for a Win 3.1 device
driver that let you do synch serial comms with no extra hardware on a
bog standard PC!

These days the horror of the '86 is hidden away several layers below. Hell,

Indeed.

Still handy now and then to be able to drop a debugger into disassembly
mode and look at what is *really* going on though! ;-)

I haven't written any *compiled* code for years, never mind assembler. These
days I do anything complicated in Perl.



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
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| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:03, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't
any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead,
or even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

The 8088 certainly was, since it could share many of the same
peripherals including the 8259 PIC, 8250 UART, 8254 PIT etc.


So basically it was Intels smarts that said 'use an 8 bit bus on a 16
bit chip, and you have an unholy kludge of a thing that can churn out
better than a pure 8 bit processor can, today'

Yes to the first bit, but the kludginess of it meant that even decent
Z80 systems of the day would out perform it in most apps!

But were very limited in RAM.

John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:47, Huge wrote:
On 2011-10-26, John wrote:
On 26/10/2011 02:05, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't
any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM

Was? it still is (from a developers point of view).

The good news is that I haven't written any assembler since the PDP11,
and
when I looked at the '86 out of idle curiousity, it made me nauseous.

Well to be fair, its exceedingly rare that one needs to dabble with
assembler... Only had to do it once seriously on '386 stuff and that was
for built in test code on a 386 platform when there were no compilers
capable of generating protected mode code available for it at the time!


Thats because grunts like me had written all te hardware BIOS code for
you :-)

Used to routinely do comms stuff in 8086 assembler when writing the main
app in Turbo Pascal 3[1] - but that was because the language at that
version lacked the ability to do interrupt handling etc. Once version 4
or 5 became available that was no longer needed.


Probably the worst systems programming language I have ever been exposed
to, pascal.

[1] Ah, the fond memories, an astoundingly fast and good compiler,
editor, and run time environment that all fitted in 50K on a floppy!

The number of times I have actually needed to code in assembler for
performance reasons, can probably be counted on two fingers in the last
twenty years! Once was the bitstream coding stuff on a system with very
tight and had real time limits. The other was for a Win 3.1 device
driver that let you do synch serial comms with no extra hardware on a
bog standard PC!

Writing a Pre-emptive multitasking kernel to slide under DOS2.2 was
probably the last one I did..what a horrible thing to have to do. There
was one bug I couldn't get rid of. Some things you might be doing on te
PC would crash it

But since that happened fairly often with DOS2.2 it wasn't a practical
issue.




These days the horror of the '86 is hidden away several layers below.
Hell,

Indeed.

Agreed.


Still handy now and then to be able to drop a debugger into disassembly
mode and look at what is *really* going on though! ;-)


So rare as to be a complete tribute to modern compilers. I used to do
it all the time to see what a mess they had made of the C code..Eraly C
cross compilers were frankly, ****e.

Mark Williams, Digital Research, BDS, Introl.. not one of them was
anything like intelligent.

On 26/10/2011 12:17, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:47, Huge wrote:
On 2011-10-26, John wrote:
On 26/10/2011 02:05, Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It
wasn't any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.

You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM

Was? it still is (from a developers point of view).

The good news is that I haven't written any assembler since the
PDP11, and
when I looked at the '86 out of idle curiousity, it made me nauseous.

Well to be fair, its exceedingly rare that one needs to dabble with
assembler... Only had to do it once seriously on '386 stuff and that
was for built in test code on a 386 platform when there were no
compilers capable of generating protected mode code available for it
at the time!


Thats because grunts like me had written all te hardware BIOS code for
you :-)

Hardware BIOS, not on this box... (embedded military application).

This was all embedded (4MB of ROM in the days when that was *vast*).

This was a system that was built to originally run on 8086 systems, but
they ran out of CPU oomph and ROM space. Someone had the bright idea
switching to the then "new" 386, which in itself would have been fine
if they had done what the PC makers at the time were doing - i.e. let it
power up in real mode, and leave it there behaving like a really fast
8086. Slap in a bit of bank switch logic to page the roms about and they
would have been up and running almost immediately. Alas someone decided
to be clever, and use all the new toys to construct a logical mapping of
the required address space using physical to linear address remapping,
then create a virtual 8086 process to run in it, while rewriting a
premptive MASCOT kernel to keep tabs on it in protected mode. Took the
best part of two years to get back to a working system!

Used to routinely do comms stuff in 8086 assembler when writing the
main app in Turbo Pascal 3[1] - but that was because the language at
that version lacked the ability to do interrupt handling etc. Once
version 4 or 5 became available that was no longer needed.


Probably the worst systems programming language I have ever been exposed
to, pascal.

Well there was Pascal and Turbo Pascal. Pascal was elegant, nice to read
but relatively ineffectual in real world applications unless extended.
When you think there were 25 odd built in functions in normal pascal,
and 600 odd in turbo, it was not so much pascal with extensions as
extensions with pascal. The result was a very good "kitchen sink"
environment, in which you could do just about anything. Turbo C came
later, but was never as nice (and way slower compiling).

[1] Ah, the fond memories, an astoundingly fast and good compiler,
editor, and run time environment that all fitted in 50K on a floppy!

The number of times I have actually needed to code in assembler for
performance reasons, can probably be counted on two fingers in the
last twenty years! Once was the bitstream coding stuff on a system
with very tight and had real time limits. The other was for a Win 3.1
device driver that let you do synch serial comms with no extra
hardware on a bog standard PC!

Writing a Pre-emptive multitasking kernel to slide under DOS2.2 was
probably the last one I did..what a horrible thing to have to do. There
was one bug I couldn't get rid of. Some things you might be doing on te
PC would crash it

But since that happened fairly often with DOS2.2 it wasn't a practical
issue.

I remember having a new grad working with me once, who had been set a
job like this for some course work... I seem to recall getting roped in
to debug it for him! (it was actually quite entertaining since he was
studying at my old college, and had the same lecturer who about seven
years previously had also take some of my classes. Hence there was some
satisfaction to tracking down the bug to a flaw in the template code
that the lecturer had furnished for them to build on!)




These days the horror of the '86 is hidden away several layers below.
Hell,

Indeed.

Agreed.


Still handy now and then to be able to drop a debugger into
disassembly mode and look at what is *really* going on though! ;-)


So rare as to be a complete tribute to modern compilers. I used to do it

Last time I recall needing to do it was not really for a compiler
problem as such (was using Borland C++ Builder for Win32), but a subtle
coding error. There was a routine that seemed to suffer local variable
corruption in the process of running. Turned out the problem occurred as
you stepped over a function call - even though stepping into and out of
it seemed to work ok, and the function did whatever it was supposed to
as well. It became obvious looking at the code that it was mishandling
the stack frame on entry and hence corrupting the stack frame of its
caller - however by fluke, did manage to clean up the stack on exit and
return to the right place. It transpired someone had coded a library
routine with a different stated calling convention to that declared in
the functions header file, and the compiler had not noticed. Hence the
compiler built the parameters to be passed in to one standard, and the
function processed them as if set out for a different one.

all the time to see what a mess they had made of the C code..Eraly C
cross compilers were frankly, ****e.

In many cases its not that much better now[1] alas. The main problem
seems to be that a well known and used embedded development systems may
get tens of thousands of users at best, whereas even an obscure native
PC one will get millions. So there never seems to be the same pressure
to find and fix the bugs in the same way.

[1] well allowing for not having done that much embedded stuff in the
last ten years - but I doubt the situation has changed too much.


Mark Williams, Digital Research, BDS, Introl.. not one of them was
anything like intelligent.

Two that stick in my mind were Systems Designers (SDL, later SD Scicon)
for their astoundingly bad CORAL compilers[1] (wrong code, non
executable code, oops I forgot to load a segment register code etc), to
"oh dear, I seem to have crashed, did not want a diagnostic message as
to why did you?", and Cosmic's 68K compilers... which was rather fond of
the executable code delivery (instructions not on long word boundaries
etc), and the hex file with the bytes in the wrong order!


[1] But they did dominate the market since very few vendors were
interested in making CORAL compilers...



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/

On 26/10/2011 12:09, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:49, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
John Rumm wrote:
On 26/10/2011 10:03, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
Jules Richardson wrote:
On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:46:55 +0100, John Rumm wrote:
AFAICS there wasn't much in it.
I wrote in 8086 assembler for the 8086 board I designed. It wasn't
any
more difficult than assembler for the 68000.
You are having a laugh...

I actually assumed he was just trolling, because surely even he isn't
*that* crazy.

x86 was awful, it really was. Didn't its choice largely stem from IBM
using it on an earlier product? If only they'd gone for m68k instead,
or even the ns32k...


The 8086 was a simple step up from the 8080/Z80 that was doing great
guns on CP/M in the corporate env..,natural choice for IBM.

The 8088 certainly was, since it could share many of the same
peripherals including the 8259 PIC, 8250 UART, 8254 PIT etc.


So basically it was Intels smarts that said 'use an 8 bit bus on a 16
bit chip, and you have an unholy kludge of a thing that can churn out
better than a pure 8 bit processor can, today'

Yes to the first bit, but the kludginess of it meant that even decent
Z80 systems of the day would out perform it in most apps!

But were very limited in RAM.

Not so much... CP/M 3+ was out by then, and that allowed access to more
RAM with bank switching - and that was no more of a hardship than '86
style segmentation in many respects. Many early PCs only had 64K or 128K
(not forgetting the "huge" 640K limit! ;-))



--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/