steves@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Steve Schlesinger) (05/19/88)
>> Imagine a version of the microprogrammable chip in which the operating >> system could context switch among trusted sets of microprograms. Weird. No. Not weird. > >Weird, maybe, but did not the Burroughs 1700 series do this a long time ago? The NCR 8000 and 9000 series have writable control store today. They support multiple instruction sets in the standard product line. The 9300 had a Forth microcode set written for it. Some university (I forgot which) wrote a Prolog instruction set in microcode.
root@sbcs.sunysb.edu (SBCS Systems Staff) (05/19/88)
In article <2223@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM>, steves@ncr-sd.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Steve Schlesinger) writes: > >> Imagine a version of the microprogrammable chip in which the operating > >> system could context switch among trusted sets of microprograms. Weird. > Not weird at all when you start looking into the latest user configurable gate array products from Xilinx, etc. These are really nice in that you get to program the hardware, etc from either EPROM or from a uP. I suppose you could look at them as sort of writeable picostore :-). Rick Spanbauer SUNY/Stony Brook