4 May
2025
4 May
'25
8:39 p.m.
On May 4, 2025, at 2:24 PM, ben via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 2025-05-04 2:11 a.m., jos via cctalk wrote:
Well for BASIC that is true.
The Fairchild Symbol Computer was test to just how far TTL could go.
Well, of course any general purpose computer can be made to run BASIC. If you mean that a
microcoded machine could directly implement a pseudo-code representation of BASIC, sure, I
suppose so. There isn't much point in that, though. Better just to compile it.
A language for which specific machines have been built a number of times is FORTH, which
makes sense because it is a rather low level language that explicitly manipulates data on
stacks. And the execution model has two stacks, so it is tempting to build a machine that
directly deals with that. There are some nice FPGA blocks for this, in VHDL or Verilog;
one example I remember was built to enable a robotics or machine vision application.
paul
I recall
that system had many boards, the whole "CPU" box was external to
the monitor (and in the earliest versions, the power supply was also a
large external box). I can't really fathom creating a BASIC out of raw
TTL, or maybe I'm misunderstanding the approach.
You build a processor with
some TTL, and then implement a BASIC on that microprocessor.
There is always this intermediate step, no machine executes BASIC directly in TTL. Look here for an example of a processor
(Datapoint 2200) in TTL :
https://bitsavers.org/pdf/datapoint/2200/jdreesen_shematics/DP2200_mb.pdf
Jos
Micocoded coded machines, could likely be programed to run basic.
Ben.