PDP-10 arch question

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Fri Oct 23 15:09:03 1998

"Hans Franke" <franke_at_sbs.de> wrote:
> Wasn't the 432 able to adress whole Objectspace
> as Bits ?

No, it didn't even have pointers to bytes.

The Intel iAPX 432 General Data Processor (GDP) had Access Descriptors (ADs)
which pointed to entire objects. Indexing could be done to the byte level of
the data portion of an object, or to an individual AD of the access portion.
(The data portion couldn't store ADs, and the access portion couldn't store
data.)

You're probably thinking of the instruction objects, which contained up
to 64 kbits (8 kbytes) of instructions. The instructions were of variable
bit lengths from 6 bits (return) to 344 bits, and were not aligned.

Eric
Received on Fri Oct 23 1998 - 15:09:03 BST