Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!mmm
From: mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: TISC processor (not a joke, but not real either)
Message-ID: <18777@cup.portal.com>
Date: 25 May 89 04:03:43 GMT
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 11

The recent joke postings on SISC (Single Instruction Set Computers) remind
me that I once heard the minimum instruction set of a computer is two:
INC and BEQ.  Of course, this assumes wraparound of the integer number space.
Even with only two instructions, you can't quite use a single bit instruction
word length, because both of these instructions take an absolute address as
an argument.

Along the same lines, I mentioned in sci.electronics that the Signetics 8X300
has a particularly sparse instruction set:  only one arithmetic instruction,
ADD, and two logicals, AND and XOR.  You're expected to derive all the rest
(e.g. INC, DEC, SUB, NEG, OR, COM) from these three.