tbrakitz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Byron Rakitzis) (03/08/90)
For those of you missing the point of BISC, here's what it is: I want to write a system which most closely emulates "serious" processors of today (VAX, MIPS etc.). I realy don't care one wht about the real-time performance of BISC since I know that it's going to be a complete dog anyway. Its elegance will lie in the very fact that it will be a segmented architecture with full memory protection, code relocation, you name it. All I really want to do is learn a lot about operating systems, and this seems like one of the most far-out ways to do it. Before I can write a real O/S, though, I need a BISC. I *don't* want to have users' code running in 6502 native mode. If nothing else, I am fairly sure I can cut down on code size drastically by having interpreted instructions. Furthermore, I *want* my processes to be completely blind about the O/S that they are running on. That's one of the big strengths of UNIX, in my opinion, and while it doesn't make for good game-playing machines, it does make for portability and versatility. -- Just try taking your VAX down to Jiffy-Lube these days! Byron "Bo knows parallel computational geometry" Rakitzis. (tbrakitz@phoenix.Princeton.EDU)