Proposed Assembler Commands

In article , keith wrote: [...]

The two best editors ever made are "credit" by Intel and the Wordstar like IDE one from Borland.

Credit has a move the cursor and type mode stuff and a command mode. The command mode was simple yet very powerful. You could write complete programs in the commands.

The Borland IDE is about the only one I've seen that does what it is told about selecting text. Most other editors remove the selection on the merest whim of the program.

We just cross-assembled uP code on a DEC timeshare system (later, on a PC) and ran a tiny "monitor" (hex loader/debug thing) on the target itself. That was a lot more efficient than buying a monster soon-to-be-obsolete ICEbox.

Nowadays we cross-assemble on a PC and test with a background debug pod running off an ebay laptop. The whole chain costs about $600, roughly $100 in 1972 dollars.

John

In article , Rich Grise wrote: [....]

The MDS-800 was a card cage which held "multibus" cards. It had room for something like 10 cards. There was a row of switches on the front panel. You could assert an interrupt with 8 of them. One of them swapped a chunk of RAM space with some ROM to boot the machine.

Later came the "series 2". These were a combined terminal and "multibus" rack. It had room for 4 boards mounted horizontally in the bottom. The "series 2" machines had a design flaw where the current in some Molex connectors was more than they could be trusted to handle. The connectors were a cheap single wipe design in a white plactic housing. After a few months of service they would become a zero wipe connector is a brown plastic housing.

After the "series 2" came the "series 3". This was intended to develop

ICE-86 was an emulator for the 8086. It copied mostly the commands of ICE-80. You could load the program into the RAM iside the ICE-86 and run it on your target hardware. The load operation took (on my project) 4 hours[1] to load the code. If you loaded a small program and then transfered the real code via a RS232 link it was much faster so that is what we did.

After the "series 3" came the "series 4" which led us to state that each version is better than the next.

The operating system was something called ISIS. It was a more advanced operating system than MSDOS was on the day the PC came out.

In article , John Larkin wrote: [...]

We used timeshare to compile the 4040 code but when we went to 8080 we got the MDS-800

I now have a cute little trick designed into a 8051 project that does hardware breakpointing on writes of given values to given locations.

The 8051 emulator we had would not work on a PCI machine and I didn't have a ISA machine and there was some extra room in the CPLD.

The Cygnal processors have a built in breakpoint system. Too bad they don't document the JTAG interface so you have to spend $100 on a debugger that doesn't work very well.