Re: Emigration from Usenet [was: Re: PTD was the most-respected of the AUE regulars ...]

On Thu, 8 Aug 2024, Dan Purgert wrote:

On 2024-08-07, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On 07 Aug 2024 15:04:21 GMT, Aharon Robbins wrote:
>

A CS professor I know told me this last week:
>
      I'm one of the very few that teach Systems. It amazes me that our
      PhD students almost all in AI have never heard of a program
      counter.

>
“Program counter” ... is that a von Neumann thing?

>
It's the thing that holds the address of the current instruction being
executed.
>
Effectively, CPU's operate like this loop here
>
 int pc=0;
 while (1) {
   execute_instruction (pc);
   pc++;
 }
>
After that, 'execute_instruction' can be thought of as a big conditional
statement that actually performs the task -- moving data between CPU
registers, reading from RAM, whatever.
>
>

Could it have been called instruction counter on some platforms? My memory is very hazy but I vaguely remember a register you could manipulate directly from my assembler labs and the long gone days when I thought computer viruses were interesting.