Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I doubt I shall ever again have such a feeling of warping into the future as I got when moving from coding 6502 assembler on the Beeb to ARM-2 on the Archimedes. Suddenly there were enough registers. And they were all general purpose: use for arithmetic, use as an index, do whatever you need to. And all the instructions were conditional; hardly needed branches. And the memory map was flat. And everything was 32-bit. And no weird operand modes. And the best Beeb feature was still there: the assembler was still built-in to BBC Basic.


Unbelievable that ARM1 was only 25k transistors, when an 8086 was nearly 30k. The efficient use of resources was phenomenal.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: