[Gllug] Small rant

[Rich Walker]

Nix <nix at esperi.org.uk> writes:

> On Thu, 10 Nov 2005, Christian Smith stated:
>> The i432 also had utterly horrid sounding memory protection.
>
> OK, you've piqued my curiosity. I know nothing about the i432, but...
> how could they have made something worse than the segmented joy which
> was the 80286? What on earth did they do?
>
> `Upon access violations, a dragon arises from beneath the motherboard
> and eats the user'? ;)

It was designed to support ADA (IIRC) at a low level.

This made it *very* odd.

It had some nice features: multiprocessing, fault tolerance.

But it embedded a load of OS-level concepts in microcode, had the
microcode in a separate chip with a 16-bit-bus between the two, had bugs
in the microcode, and ran like a dog.

I have a manual somewhere - it was an *interesting* failure.

cheers, Rich.

-- 
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