🚀 go-pugleaf

gerhard@netmbx.netmbx.de (Gerhard Hoffmann) writes:
>In article <By4pEI.8r5.2@cs.cmu.edu> lindsay+@cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay) writes:
>>- PALcode is fetched from the I-cache, not from ROM.
>
>This doesn't mean anything. Early low-end /360 machines had their 
>microcode in main store, and still it was microcode.

IBM called it microcode, but I don't. In fact, they built a small
minicomputer, and then wrote a software interpreter which took 360
instructions and did them. Calling that "microcode" was more a
political statement than a technical one. Admittedly, some microcode
schemes are more encoded than others: but this "vertical microcode"
has abandoned all the things that the word "microcode" usually means,
except one. [That users be prohibited from writing in it!]

PALcode is far more analogous to supervisor state than to microcode.
If people want to reply that supervisor state smells like microcode,
then I will hold my tongue and let them.
-- 
Don		D.C.Lindsay	Carnegie Mellon Computer Science