peterb@pbear.UUCP (04/24/85)
Laura, don't knock the pdp-8 so much. I HAVE written a quicksort in pdp-8 assembler, and it was simply ordering 12 bit keys field on a 48 bit record. I squashed that thing down to one page of code. (The stacks took up an entire field.) The 8 was (and is) a good machine. It introduced some nifty concepts and had some real problems as well. But to think that multiuser OS's ran on that beast is amazing. To realize that the kernel was only 8k (including buffers) is amazing!!! Have you ever seen a full ANSI fortran compiler fit in under 50kb ? On the 8, fort II fit in 8k and fort IV in 12. People hated the thing since their literals squashed up against the end of their code, but the best part of it was that it forced the mind to take the extra steps (now thought of as superfolous) to optimize the code and above that, optimize the algorithm to complete the task. It was not uncommon for people to spend days trying to squash programs down to size and to squash an extra word out of a page. I bet you that given a simple task, I can come up with an extremely compact pdp-8 version of the code that is tighter than those produced for multi register machines. My experience on that machine has become invaluable now. Don't knock it till you try it (or if you have, just think that this was loved by scientists and lab techs around the world less than 20 years ago). Peter Barada ima!pbear!peterb ihnp4!inmet!pbear!peterb