Slick Bits in Computers (WAS VAXen Rule!)

[Tony Duell]

> There have to be some more designs that were so elegant or well-done 
> that you stepped back to admire them. 
> What were they?

There are many 'little bits' of machines that I feel are well designed,
but nothing instantly springs to mind. An example is PDP11/45 floating
point processo, which automatically does multiplication by 1111 (say) as a
subtract, followed by shifts, followed by an add (thus turning it into
10000 - 1). 

Oh, the RK07 head servo gets the honour for giving me many sleepless 
nights trying to figure it out. I can;t rememebr how many signals appear 
at the summing node of the output amplifier, but it's quite a few...

A software example is the firmware for the Z80 on the PERQ 2 EIO board. 
There's a cooperative multitasker hidden in that ROM.

-tony