Chips that changed the world

[Dave McGuire]

On May 3, 2009, at 8:32 PM, Warren Wolfe wrote:
> As it turns out, yes, it could.-- sort of.  The first job was to  
> take the 31-K TD-830 code, and make it more efficient.  That got  
> about another 4 K, and was politically very difficult, as the  
> TD-830 people were in a different group, and got huffy at us  
> improving their code.  Then the TTY code was written with an  
> INCREDIBLE number of "dirty tricks."  Of course, we called routines  
> already written for the TD-830 whenever possible, and, truth be  
> told, sometimes when it was NOT possible.  at one point, we hopped  
> into a text message which terminated (as did they all) with a byte  
> of 00H, which is a NOP for the Z80, and then fell into another  
> routine.  ASCII characters tend to be register-to-register moves,  
> we just loaded different registers with input values, and used some  
> of the effects to save a dozen or so bytes of code.  When all was  
> said and done, it worked, an we had 5 extra bytes, so we wrote a  
> "LIFE" program.  (Just kidding.)  Anyway, the project manager later  
> said that we had used everything but the top half of the blue bytes.

   Yow.  That sounds like the innards of Intel's 8052AH-BASIC  
interpreter.  Have you ever read that source code?  It's mind- 
boggling.  I spent days un-tricking it and documenting it.  (my  
application targeted processors with significantly more code space  
than the 8052's 8KB)

> Also, by comparison, note that AT&T was prohibited from selling or  
> licensing Unix as a commercial product until about 1984, though thy  
> DID place it in universities.  The point is that they did NOT have  
> "market pressures" for new releases, and because of that, produced  
> a huge, complex, quite possibly bug-free product that is a joy to  
> use.  And I'm not sorry to sound like an evangelist -- Unix is the  
> best software ever written by humans.  It was also originally  
> conceived in the 1960s, and made it into reasonable use in the  
> early 1970s, so its OLD software, for purposes of OT discussion.   
> The Mac world has recently made a massive improvement by going to  
> an O/S based upon a flavor of Unix.  Now, we need to do that for  
> the PC world, and normal progress can resume.  There's no need to  
> be chipping new wheel designs out of stone when we have an  
> independent suspension chassis available, and can bolt on any body  
> we want.  Let the programmers develop gee-gaws and new user  
> interfaces for it, but the core, the user and process handling and  
> the file system of Unix are WAY better than any other attempt so  
> far.  Linux is a variant, and free.  So....  "Not Invented Here" is  
> the only reason to use another base O/S, at least until something  
> better comes along.

   Agree 100%.  Loudly.

           -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire
Port Charlotte, FL