Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!purdue!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!agate!eos!ptolemy!raymond
From: raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov (Eric A. Raymond)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: WISC "impossibility"
Message-ID: <1140@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 6 May 89 00:39:26 GMT
References: <38853@bbn.COM> <423@bnr-fos.UUCP> <288@ctycal.UUCP> <1262@l.cc.purdue.edu> <231@celit.UUCP> <10544@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <27034@ism780c.isc.com> <831@m3.mfci.UUCP>
Reply-To: raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Eric A. Raymond)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center
Lines: 13

>A couple of years ago there was an article in Byte about a proposed design
>which they called WISC for Writeable Instruction Set Computer.  The idea

Am I missing something?  Wouldn't a machine with loadable microcode
satisfy this?  Hasn't that been done for years (and was was the floppy
disk was designed to store)?  Even LISPM's have it.

Did the original poster mean that a program could change the ucode?
This is a little more complicated ....

-- 
Eric A. Raymond  (raymond@ptolemy.arc.nasa.gov)
G7 C7 G7 G#7 G7 G+13 C7 GM7 Am7 Bm7 Bd7 Am7 C7 Do13 G7 C7 G7 D+13: Elmore James