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Date: Thu, 30 Jul 2015 10:43:28 +1000
From: Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au>
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On 29Jul2015 10:51, random832@fastmail.us <random832@fastmail.us> wrote:
>On Sun, Jul 26, 2015, at 07:48, Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>> At first, there was only the machine language. Assembly languages
>> introduced "mnemonics" for the weaklings who couldn't remember the
>> opcodes by heart.
>
>To be fair, x86 is also a particularly terrible example of a machine
>language, from the perspective of someone imagining being expected to
>memorize it. Compare it with PDP-11, which had eight registers and eight
>addressing modes and a whole lot less to memorize (since each of these
>appears in every instruction as a single octal digit).

16 registers - you forget the alternate register set.

Since the UNIX V7 kernel code never made use of them we used to use them as a 
crude messaging system from user space, as what you put there sayed there, 
globally accessible by other users.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@zip.com.au>

TeX: When you pronounce it correctly to your computer, the terminal may
     become slightly moist.     - D. E. Knuth.