mo@seismo.UUCP (Mike O'Dell) (05/05/84)
While this discussion should probably be moved to net.arch, one passing thought... I too cut my first chops on a venerable 1620 and am quite fond of that machine. The software for it was pretty amazing, considering the vintage and the table-driven hardware. Anyway, I have on and off given thought to building an emulator running on, say, a 68K system. This isn't very hard architecturally; 1620 I/O is synchronous (yes, that's right) and a byte would store a digit just fine. I suspect a 10-Meg 68K could software-emulate a 1620 faster than the 1620 can. Anyway, there are some very strange things in the instruction set that I never did master, even with the hardware manual, and would be worried about having a precise enough description of the machine to work with. BTW - the machine I learned on was a Model 1 with Indirect Addressing, hardware Floating Point, Transmit Numeric Strip and Fill, Record hardware, 40,000 digits of memory, a 1443 buffered printer, the usual card read/punch, and 2, count 'em, 2 1311 disk drives! That machine was a genuine Cadillac. No machine I have used since has been as amply configured, based on what was state-of-the-art in the machine's heyday and how richly the machine could be configured. -Mike O'Dell