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.