Re: Instruction Tracing

According to OrangeFish  <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid>:

As far as the delayed branches and such, they made sense in the narrow
time window when it was too expensive to put a cache on a workstation
but that time came and went by the time the RT shipped.

>
A long time ago, I heard (or maybe read) that the original ROMP was
chopped in half (the FP stuff was removed) by orders of marketing for
some sort of h/w word-processor.  When that product bombed and the
workstation market blossomed, the engineers "bolted" the FP stuff back
on.  I cannot find the source.  Is there any truth to this?

I also heard that the ROMP was originally intended for some sort of
word processor from the Office Products division (the O in ROMP) and
was repurposed into a workstation.

The RT's floating point was an add-on card with a Natl Semi FPU
that appeared at high memory addresses.  I would be surprised if
any of the ROMP's predecessors had hardware FP.  The 801 didn't
and it would make no sense for word processing.

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