IBM 610 workstation computer 3464

On Thu, 02 Mar 06 13:21:28 GMT in alt.folklore.computers,

ISTM he's talking about the processor chips nowadays. Some other devices are still not too different from RH20s and require adhoc driver tweaks to get them working as per actual behaviour, rather than the spec, but some device standardization is getting better.

There's a bit of crossed wires going on where posters are not making it explicitly clear exactly which piece of hardware they mean.

PDP-11s were nice, clean, byte-addressed machines (and used octal not hex!) But then you've never dealt with nice clean byte-addressed

HLLs are an economic tradeoff: DEC built great MACRO buttemblers and (mostly) fairly lousy compilers; some other vendors built fairly lousy buttemblers but great optimizing compilers. Remember, even from fairly early on (1950s), a major goal of computing was to allow most work to be done in Higher Order Languages.

There are, as in most computing, tradeoffs between word-byte addressed machines, and low-high level languages: it's nice to have as many choices as possible when you have to get work done to meet a set of goals. Nowadays, HLLs and byte-addressed machines are how most work gets done to meet most goals. Bloat and bugs are a result of certain (bad) atbreastudes about how (some) work may be done to meet goals.

-- Thanks. Take care, Brian Inglis Calgary, Alberta, Canada

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