BTI 8000

[Jim Battle]

Chris Kennedy wrote:
> Jim Battle wrote:
> 
>> A few months back I made contact with the the guy who was the lead of 
>> the software group at BTI. 
> 
> Which one?  We always seemed to have like four :)

Ron Crandall.  When I was at BTI (1985-1986) Ron was the only main SW guy.

When I talked with Ron, he said Tom Poulter (founder of BTI, and 
previously the product manager of the HP 2000, I believe) still had two 
8000s and docs and media.  Ron said he'd contact Tom for me, but I never 
heard anything back.

> Has anyone tried pinging Jimbo to see if he has any stuff hanging about?

You are over my head.  I'm not sure who Jimbo is.

> Pity he never implemented Intercal for the 8000.  It could have been a 
> real competitor for Dragon ;)

In 1986, before the big shutdown, there was an optimizing C compiler 
that had been written in house.  I'm sure it never made it out the door, 
though.  I can just imagine:

struct {
    unsigned int bleb:5;
    unsigned int foo:7;
    unsigned int bar:11;
} thing;
...

     thing.bar += thing.foo;

That probably would have taken two instructions, as the BTI architecture 
allowed specifying an operand such as a bitfield of a word at a given 
offset from a base register.

Not that such cases are performance critical.