@kentpitman@climatejustice.social
Post #1444949
2026-03-07 19:12 UTC
@dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
In effect, a Q register, what passed for storage in TECO, was something you can name in one bite. So 1,2mA meaning call what's in A with args 1 and 2 was a high-level language function call with two arguments that fit into a single machine word. Even the PDP-10 pushj instruction, which was pretty sophisticated as a way of calling a function, couldn't pass arguments with that degree of compactness.
Replies (2)
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@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz 2026-03-07 19:20
@kentpitman As usual, Kent, an excellent description -- and I had forgotten some of those details, but yes, those were very real advantages. @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot
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@djl@mastodon.mit.edu 2026-03-08 00:24
@kentpitman @dougmerritt @wrog @ramin_hal9001 @screwlisp @cdegroot Yes, right. To all that. One minor point is that the PDP-6/10 had a byte-addressing instruction that was pretty weird (overkill in flexibility, like every PDP-6/10 instruction). So that data packing wasn't all that unreasonable. I showed up to the TECO world in Jan. 1973 with a gofer programming gig in the Macsyma group. The Datapoint terminals were already there, so I missed the pre-(almost)WYSIWYG days.