Posted on 07/06/2008 1:35:22 PM PDT by HAL9000
Excerpt -
PCW: Can you share any funny, interesting, or unusual anecdotes about the 8086 that we haven't covered already?SM: I always regret that I didn't fix up some idiosyncrasies of the 8080 when I had a chance. For example, the 8080 stores the low-order byte of a 16-bit value before the high-order byte. The reason for that goes back to the 8008, which did it that way to mimic the behavior of a bit-serial processor designed by Datapoint (a bit-serial processor needs to see the least significant bits first so that it can correctly handle carries when doing additions). Now there was no reason for me to continue this idiocy, except for some obsessive desire to maintain strict 8080 compatibility. But if I had made the break with the past and stored the bytes more logically, nobody would have objected. And today we wouldn't be dealing with issues involving big-endian and little-endian--the concepts just wouldn't exist.
Another thing I regret is that some of my well-chosen instruction mnemonics were renamed when the instruction set was published. I still think it's catchier to call the instruction SIGN-EXTEND, having the mnemonic of SEX, than to call it CONVERT-BYTE-TO-WORD with the boring mnemonic CBW.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Regardless of any "flaws" determined in hindsight, it was certainly a major accomplishment and world-changing invention.
pocket-protector alert.
Two endians walk into a bar. The big endian says to the little endian, “where do get a byte around here?”.
Having spent years in 360/370 bit-twiddling, this drove me crazy for a long time.
BUMP!
I had to do a double take on the name.
/rimshot
"I kinda feel like a nybble myself".
/rimshot
too many vowels. :-)
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