Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!bellcore!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!a.sei.cmu.edu!tgl
From: tgl@a.sei.cmu.edu (Tom Lane)
Newsgroups: net.micro.hp
Subject: Re: what is the cpu for HP-87 ?
Message-ID: <215@a.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: Thu, 16-Jan-86 21:56:34 EST
Article-I.D.: a.215
Posted: Thu Jan 16 21:56:34 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 19-Jan-86 04:16:41 EST
References: <1199@princeton.UUCP>
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 28

In-Reply-To: P Wei's netnews message of Tue, 14-Jan-86 23:09:15 EST

It's a proprietary HP processor bearing hardly any resemblance to
any known commercial microprocessor ... just to give you an idea,
there are 64 on-chip registers!

Curiously enough, it's also quite slow ... typical instruction times of
more than 5 microseconds.  However, it is real good on multi-precision
arithmetic, as a single instruction can add binary or BCD numbers of any
width from 1 to 8 bytes.  This suggests to me that it might be
descended from the processor in some early HP hand calculator, but I
don't know this for a fact.

If you are eager to learn to program it, buy the Assembler ROM for the
87; it includes the only available documentation. Unfortunately, this
manual has to be the worst piece of writing I have ever seen from HP.
If you can find the manual for the HP-85B Assembler ROM, you should
study the two together.  The latter covers similar material but was
written by a different person, and the errors occur in different
places... be prepared to experiment to discover the Truth.

Another source of assembly programming info is Professional Computing,
a bimonthly rag that is mostly devoted to Series 80.  Their address is
PO Box 250, Camden, Maine 04843 and subs are $29.97/year (6 issues).

hope this helps            tom lane (lane@a.cs.cmu.edu on ARPA)

The usual disclaimer goes here.