In article <linux.kernel.20000406160231.A12908@munchkin.spectacle-pond.org>,
Michael Meissner <meissner@spectacle-pond.org> wrote:
>unveristy had a couple of Terak (spelling?) computers that had a P-code Pascal
>compiler on them. The compiler would use the black and white video memory as a
>scratch pad (and naturally get 'random' patterns on the screen).
The Terak doesn't have video memory -- you can point the video into
arbitrary bits of core and display what's there. The Pascal
compiler would simply point the video at about 2/3rds page above the
top of the mark every now and then, so you could watch things being
scribbled (and, if the program was too complicated, you could see
the stack coming down towards the heap until the inevitable stack
overrun happened.
And there's a certain skill to programming on a system that runs at
possibly 20,000 p-code instructions per second and has a filesystem
that only allows 77 files/volume and doesn't alloc file
fragmentation. It took me 17 minutes to recompile the p2 compiler
(due to hand-written assembly to do keyword and token searches),
though I have to switch floppies to link the silly thing.
____
david parsons \bi/ Of course, it's been about 8 years since I last
\/ booted my Terak.
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Apr 07 2000 - 21:00:17 EST