12 Mar
2023
12 Mar
'23
9:39 p.m.
Hum, I don't think I ever knew that.
What I do remember is being puzzled about how you would implement code
in ROM because clearly a JMS won't work. One assumes that this is one
reason the equivalent PDP-10 instruction (JSR) eventually became less
used. I think some version of FOROTS still supported that calling
interface. You can also use it in ALGOL for external calls to
separately linked FOROTS subroutines, I think.
What's interesting to me is that, to this day, the IBM 390 ISA still
doesn't have a stack instruction. Just like the PDP-8.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
On 3/12/23 4:15 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
TSS-8 wouldn't have a chance of doing DECnet, I'd say.
But in another way, that would perhaps have been an interesting system
to have it for. But by DECnet time, TSS-8 was mostly not worked on
anymore. But the PDP-8 is a fun architecture. The only serious
misfeature is the interrupt handling around changed instruction field,
which forces anyone who wants to implement virtual memory to implement
full emulation of the PDP-8 architecture for that one special case.
Johnny
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> On 2023-03-12 21:08, Thomas DeBellis wrote:
>
> Bummer, I was hoping that there was a version for TSS-8. That would
> have been exceptionally cool. I am always amazed what could be wrung
> out of that processor.
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> On 3/12/23 12:12 PM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>>
>> Actually, I just remembered that there is one client and server task
>> included, and that is the TALK/LISTEN. Sortof makes sense, since you
>> might want the operator to be able to communicate with operators on
>> other systems.