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From: kludge@gitpyr.UUCP (Scott Dorsey)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: HP RISC comments
Message-ID: <1553@gitpyr.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 16-Mar-86 13:44:27 EST
Article-I.D.: gitpyr.1553
Posted: Sun Mar 16 13:44:27 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 17-Mar-86 04:19:46 EST
References: <6504@utzoo.UUCP>
Reply-To: kludge@gitpyr.UUCP (Scott Dorsey)
Organization: Georgia College Of Universal Knowledge
Lines: 26
Keywords: HP Spectrum


   If anyone out there has seen the HP spectrum and looked carefully at
it, I'd like to hear your comments.  From a cursory inspection it looks
like an HP3000 (which has an interesting, albeit slow, stack architecture),
with a mode bit, which, when set, puts the user into some sort of RISC mode.
With the mode bit off, it runs HP3000 software at about the same speed as a
3000, and with it on, it runs some nonstandard kind of RISC software.  
   It looks possible to run both modes at the same time for different
processes, but I haven't seen the software support yet.  MPE, maybe?   I'd 
also like to see if they kept the 'privileged segments' concept on the RISC
half... it was interesting to set one of the bits in your program header
(usually using the disk editor), so that when the loader picked it up, it
gave it privileged mode.  Worst security I've seen lately. 
-- 
-------
Disclaimer: Everything I say is probably a trademark of someone.  But
            don't worry, I probably don't know what I'm talking about.

Scott Dorsey       " If value corrupts
Kaptain_kludge         then absolute value corrupts absolutely"

ICS Programming Lab (Where old terminals go to die), Rich 110,
Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
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