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From: John Levine <johnl@taugh.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Instruction Tracing
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2024 17:55:40 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: Taughannock Networks
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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.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly