"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.

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 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 23:54:48 +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.

"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.

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

"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.

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.

"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.

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 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...

"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.

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.

On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home 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 the first person I have ever heard say that.

Most of my career has been 8086 family; I hate it. Barring the iapx432
it's the nastiest instruction set I've ever used.

Andy

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 22:20:24 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:

In article ,
Andy Champ wrote:

On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home 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 the first person I have ever heard say that.

Most of my career has been 8086 family; I hate it. Barring the iapx432
it's the nastiest instruction set I've ever used.

Beats the IBM 360/370, does it?

For the best, most orthogonal instruction set, you still can't beat the
PDP-10...



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

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

in 1076008 20111026 222024 Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Andy Champ wrote:

On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home 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 the first person I have ever heard say that.

Most of my career has been 8086 family; I hate it. Barring the iapx432
it's the nastiest instruction set I've ever used.

Beats the IBM 360/370, does it?

You jest, sire.
Every micro instruction set is nastier than IBM 360

On 26/10/2011 22:20, Tim Streater wrote:
In article ,
Andy Champ wrote:

On 25/10/2011 23:36, dennis@home 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 the first person I have ever heard say that.

Most of my career has been 8086 family; I hate it. Barring the iapx432
it's the nastiest instruction set I've ever used.

Beats the IBM 360/370, does it?


Oddly enough I've avoided IBM mainframes.

Though now you make me think back that far, the System25 was pretty odd.
1900 and 2900 much better than the Intel, as are PPC 6800 6809 68k and
that weird TI graphics processor that has bit-specific addressing and I
can't remember the number of. Vague feeling that 8051 wasn't too good.

Andy

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

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 |
\================================================= ================/

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

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 |
\================================================= ================/

"John Rumm" wrote in message
o.uk...


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.

The 386 was designed to run Unix not DOS.
the DOS stuff was thrown in as an afterthought.

Apart from the Fortran I did at school, I learnt to program on the 8086.
I didn't find it a problem.
It did take a few weeks to produce working code.

In article , The Natural Philosopher
writes

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

Then Intel brought out the crippled 386sx (= a 286 in drag).

--
(\__/)
(='.'=)
(")_(")

On 27/10/2011 16:21, Mike Tomlinson wrote:
In , The Natural Philosopher
writes

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

Then Intel brought out the crippled 386sx (= a 286 in drag).


Wasn't that a '386 jammed down a narrow bus?

Andy

Mike Tomlinson wrote:
In article , The Natural Philosopher
writes

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

Then Intel brought out the crippled 386sx (= a 286 in drag).

386sx pretty good chip actually. cheap and just about ran whatever
windows it was then..3.1?

bought tens of machines using those.

On Thu, 27 Oct 2011 16:21:14 +0100, Mike Tomlinson wrote:

In article , The Natural Philosopher
writes

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

Then Intel brought out the crippled 386sx (= a 286 in drag).

Well, not quite. Just a narrower bus; programming-wise, identical. A bit
like the 8086/8088, 80186/80188, 80286/80288.

Not that many even know about the 80188 and the 80288...



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

*lightning protection* - a w_tom conductor

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 |
\================================================= ================/

"John Rumm" wrote in message
...
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.

There were better processors about, there was the 32032 (which never caught
on, I don't even remember who made it.
There were 16 and 8 bit versions of it too.

Then there were the Texas ones that didn't have registers but used main
memory and and address pointers.
They were quite interesting.

Then there was the military Intel CPUs that used the packet bus for memory
interfaces.

It wasn't until the 386 arrived and Intel pumped millions into rewriting
Unix svr4 that 4k pages became standard.
Up until then everyone had to design their own page hardware and they varied
from 1k to 32k (maybe more) dependent on the machine.

Its a shame the segmented MMU in the 286 didn't catch on, it would have made
secure code much easier.

On 26/10/2011 14:07, dennis@home wrote:

Its a shame the segmented MMU in the 286 didn't catch on, it would have
made secure code much easier.

Well it did catch on - just by the time it did it, it was the version in
the 386 that was being used...

Memory management was not that different between them, although the 386
had the massive step forward of the "granularity bit" in the descriptor
table gate entries that allowed you to indicate that the base and limit
P words were to be interpreted as multiples of 4K bytes instead of 16
bytes. That opened up the possibility of defining a 4GB flat memory
segment.


--
Cheers,

John.

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

On 26/10/2011 14:07, dennis@home wrote:
Its a shame the segmented MMU in the 286 didn't catch on, it would have
made secure code much easier.

You never used it did you?

I had to write a memory test to run on '286 machines, and our test
environment was real mode. So in and out of protected mode to get to
the extra memory.

I got a headache every day driving that damn chip. Bill Gates was right
when he said it was brain damaged.

Of course the '386 and everything since has had a segmented MMU on top
of the paging system. And how many people have used it?

Andy

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 14:07:14 +0100, dennis@home wrote:

"John Rumm" wrote in message
...
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.

There were better processors about, there was the 32032 (which never
caught on, I don't even remember who made it. There were 16 and 8 bit
versions of it too.

Natsemi. They were reasonably nice chips and a few vendors did adopt them
(e.g. Whitechapel, Sequent, Tektronix), but IIRC their interrupt handling
was pretty poor so they weren't *that* good for general-purpose use, even
though instruction execution rate and bus width was very good.

Then there were the Texas ones that didn't have registers but used main
memory and and address pointers.
They were quite interesting.

TMS9900 maybe? Sounds familiar anyway - I used to have some early '80s
OCR equipment which used one.

It wasn't until the 386 arrived and Intel pumped millions into rewriting
Unix svr4 that 4k pages became standard. Up until then everyone had to
design their own page hardware and they varied from 1k to 32k (maybe
more) dependent on the machine.

Well, that's the way it should be, surely? Tailored to the specific
hardware, not set in stone at a certain amount.

cheers

Jules

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

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,.

On Wed, 26 Oct 2011 09:06:47 +0100, Tim Streater wrote:
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.

I think that was to do with instruction restart after a page fault.

Yes, I think so... the 'leading' CPU would be able to detect the page
fault but not act on it (because the 68000 lacked the necessary low-level
gubbins to do so) - but the trailing CPU would know that the leading CPU
had encountered a fault condition and was able to jump to some (user)
code to handle the anticipated fault before it saw it, too. Presumably
that user code then also restarted the leading CPU, and all was well.

I
was at a Motorola presentation near San Francisco in 1979 when the 68000
was presented to several thousand engineers.

You were lucky - it's probably one of the best processors to be made in
the last 30-odd years. :-)

the 68010 was introduced fairly soon after, which could do it - but
no MMU available yet.

Yeah, there certainly was one eventually, though - ISTR Torch using it
for their Unix machines (and doubtless many other vendors did too),
before the '020 and '851 came out.

cheers

Jules