Re: Early-2014 Macbook Air and Linux Mint Cinnamon

Charlie Gibbs <[email protected]>
Newsgroups comp.sys.mac.vintage,comp.os.linux.misc
Message-ID <ZE%[email protected]>
On 2026-06-24, John Ames <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Wed, 24 Jun 2026 19:42:20 GMT
> Charlie Gibbs <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>> I figured that if they were going to do that, they might as well go
>> whole hog and have constructs like LD PC,<addr> for a jump, and LD
>> A,@<portnum> for input (LD @<portnum>,A for output, of course).
>
> MOV [operand], PC is actually a valid if non-conventional form of jump
> on the PDP-11; the primary difference is that it sets the flags based
> on the value of the target address. And, of course, it has memory-
> mapped I/O, so MOV Rn, [port]/MOV [port], Rn is indeed how it's done ;)

I remember being dazzled by the PDP-11's machine code.  Making PC and
SP just another two registers allowed all sorts of neat tricks, such
as enabling programmers to write threaded code that the hardware could
interpret as a byproduct of the architecture, not by convoluted tricks.

-- 
/~\  Charlie Gibbs                  |  No artificial
\ /  <[email protected]>      |  intelligence was
 X   I'm really at ac.dekanfrus     |  used in the creation
/ \  if you read it the right way.  |  of this post.
lmpx.com only provides a reader for public news (NNTP) servers. It is not affiliated with the servers or forums shown here and is not responsible for the content of articles, which is written by their respective authors.