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PDP-11 Architecture
The PDP-11 architecture is a 16-bit CISC instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It is implemented by central processing units (CPUs) and microprocessors used in PDP-11 minicomputers. It was in wide use during the 1970s, but was eventually overshadowed by the more powerful VAX architecture in the 1980s. CPU registers The CPU contains eight general-purpose 16-bit registers (R0 to R7). Register R7 is the program counter (PC). Although any register can be used as a stack pointer, R6 is the stack pointer (SP) used for hardware interrupts and traps. R5 is often used to point to the current procedure call frame. To speed up context switching, some PDP-11 models provide dual R0-R5 register sets. Kernel, Supervisor (where present), and User modes have separate memory maps, and also separate stack pointers (so that a user program cannot cause the system to malfunction by storing an invalid value in the stack pointer register). Memory Data ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Digital Equipment Corporation
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until he was forced to resign in 1992, after the company had gone into precipitous decline. The company produced many different product lines over its history. It is best known for the work in the minicomputer market starting in the early 1960s. The company produced a series of machines known as the Programmed Data Processor, PDP line, with the PDP-8 and PDP-11 being among the most successful minis in history. Their success was only surpassed by another DEC product, the late-1970s VAX "supermini" systems that were designed to replace the PDP-11. Although a number of competitors had successfully competed with Digital through the 1970s, the VAX cemented the company's place as a leading vendor in the computer space. As microcomputers improved in t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Word (computer Architecture)
In computing, a word is any processor design's natural unit of data. A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor. The number of bits or digits in a word (the ''word size'', ''word width'', or ''word length'') is an important characteristic of any specific processor design or computer architecture. The size of a word is reflected in many aspects of a computer's structure and operation; the majority of the registers in a processor are usually word-sized and the largest datum that can be transferred to and from the working memory in a single operation is a word in many (not all) architectures. The largest possible address size, used to designate a location in memory, is typically a hardware word (here, "hardware word" means the full-sized natural word of the processor, as opposed to any other definition used). Documentation for older computers with fixed word size commonly states memory sizes in words rather than bytes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Coroutine
Coroutines are computer program components that allow execution to be suspended and resumed, generalizing subroutines for cooperative multitasking. Coroutines are well-suited for implementing familiar program components such as cooperative tasks, exceptions, event loops, iterators, infinite lists and pipes. They have been described as "functions whose execution you can pause". Melvin Conway coined the term ''coroutine'' in 1958 when he applied it to the construction of an assembly program. The first published explanation of the coroutine appeared later, in 1963. Definition and types There is no single precise definition of coroutine. In 1980 Christopher D. Marlin summarized two widely-acknowledged fundamental characteristics of a coroutine: # the values of data local to a coroutine persist between successive calls; # the execution of a coroutine is suspended as control leaves it, only to carry on where it left off when control re-enters the coroutine at some later s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
X86 Architecture
x86 (also known as 80x86 or the 8086 family) is a family of complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architectures initially developed by Intel, based on the 8086 microprocessor and its 8-bit-external-bus variant, the 8088. The 8086 was introduced in 1978 as a fully 16-bit extension of 8-bit Intel's 8080 microprocessor, with memory segmentation as a solution for addressing more memory than can be covered by a plain 16-bit address. The term "x86" came into being because the names of several successors to Intel's 8086 processor end in "86", including the 80186, 80286, 80386 and 80486. Colloquially, their names were "186", "286", "386" and "486". The term is not synonymous with IBM PC compatibility, as this implies a multitude of other computer hardware. Embedded systems and general-purpose computers used x86 chips before the PC-compatible market started, some of them before the IBM PC (1981) debut. , most desktop and laptop computers sold are based o ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel
Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer components such as central processing units (CPUs) and related products for business and consumer markets. It is one of the world's List of largest semiconductor chip manufacturers, largest semiconductor chip manufacturers by revenue, and ranked in the Fortune 500, ''Fortune'' 500 list of the List of largest companies in the United States by revenue, largest United States corporations by revenue for nearly a decade, from 2007 to 2016 Fiscal year, fiscal years, until it was removed from the ranking in 2018. In 2020, it was reinstated and ranked 45th, being the List of Fortune 500 computer software and information companies, 7th-largest technology company in the ranking. It was one of the first companies listed on Nasdaq. Intel supplies List of I ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Relocation (computer Science)
In software development, relocation is the process of assigning load addresses for position-dependent code and data of a program and adjusting the code and data to reflect the assigned addresses. A linker usually performs relocation in conjunction with ''symbol resolution'', the process of searching files and libraries to replace symbolic references or names of libraries with actual usable addresses in memory before running a program. Relocation is typically done by the linker at link time, but it can also be done at load time by a relocating loader, or at run time by the running program itself. Segmentation Object files are typically segmented into various memory segment or section types. Example segment types include code segment (.text), initialized data segment (.data), uninitialized data segment (.bss), or others as established by the programmer, such as common segments, or named static segments. Relocation table The relocation table is a list of address ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Position-independent Code
In computing, position-independent code (PIC) or position-independent executable (PIE) is a body of machine code that executes properly regardless of its memory address. PIC is commonly used for shared libraries, so that the same library code can be loaded at a location in each program's address space where it does not overlap with other memory in use by, for example, other shared libraries. PIC was also used on older computer systems that lacked an MMU, so that the operating system could keep applications away from each other even within the single address space of an MMU-less system. Position-independent code can be executed at any memory address without modification. This differs from absolute code, which must be loaded at a specific location to function correctly, and load-time locatable (LTL) code, in which a linker or program loader modifies a program before execution, so it can be run only from a particular memory location. The latter terms are sometimes referred to as ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modula-2
Modula-2 is a structured, procedural programming language developed between 1977 and 1985/8 by Niklaus Wirth at ETH Zurich. It was created as the language for the operating system and application software of the Lilith personal workstation. It was later used for programming outside the context of the Lilith. Wirth viewed Modula-2 as a successor to his earlier programming languages Pascal and Modula. The main concepts are: # The module as a compiling unit for separate compiling # The coroutine as the basic building block for concurrent processes # Types and procedures that allow access to machine-specific data The language design was influenced by the Mesa language and the Xerox Alto, both from Xerox PARC, that Wirth saw during his 1976 sabbatical year there. Page 4. The computer magazine ''Byte'' devoted the August 1984 issue to the language and its surrounding environment. Wirth created the Oberon series of languages as the successor to Modula-2, while others (particularl ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Overlay (programming)
In a general computing sense, overlaying means "the process of transferring a Block (data storage), block of program code or other data into main memory, replacing what is already stored". Overlaying is a computer programming, programming method that allows programs to be larger than the computer's main memory. An embedded system would normally use overlays because of the limitation of physical memory, which is internal memory for a system-on-chip, and the lack of virtual memory facilities. Usage Constructing an overlay program involves manually dividing a program into self-contained object code blocks called overlays or links, generally laid out in a tree structure. ''Sibling'' segments, those at the same depth level, share the same memory, called ''overlay region'' or ''destination region''. An overlay manager, either part of the operating system or part of the overlay program, loads the required overlay from Auxiliary memory, external memory into its destination region when i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Virtual Addressing
In computing, a virtual address space (VAS) or address space is the set of ranges of virtual addresses that an operating system makes available to a process. The range of virtual addresses usually starts at a low address and can extend to the highest address allowed by the computer's instruction set architecture and supported by the operating system's pointer size implementation, which can be 4 bytes for 32-bit or 8 bytes for 64-bit OS versions. This provides several benefits, one of which is security through process isolation assuming each process is given a separate address space. Example :''In the following description, the terminology used will be particular to the Windows NT operating system, but the concepts are applicable to other virtual memory operating systems.'' When a new application on a 32-bit OS is executed, the process has a VAS: each one of the memory addresses (from 0 to 232 − 1) in that space can have a single byte as a value. Initially, none of them hav ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Octal
Octal (base 8) is a numeral system with eight as the base. In the decimal system, each place is a power of ten. For example: : \mathbf_ = \mathbf \times 10^1 + \mathbf \times 10^0 In the octal system, each place is a power of eight. For example: : \mathbf_8 = \mathbf \times 8^2 + \mathbf \times 8^1 + \mathbf \times 8^0 By performing the calculation above in the familiar decimal system, we see why 112 in octal is equal to 64+8+2=74 in decimal. Octal numerals can be easily converted from binary representations (similar to a quaternary numeral system) by grouping consecutive binary digits into groups of three (starting from the right, for integers). For example, the binary representation for decimal 74 is 1001010. Two zeroes can be added at the left: , corresponding to the octal digits , yielding the octal representation 112. Usage In China The eight bagua or trigrams of the I Ching correspond to octal digits: * 0 = ☷, 1 = ☳, 2 = ☵, 3 = ☱, * 4 = ☶, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Logical Address
In computing, a logical address is the address at which an item ( memory cell, storage element, network host) appears to reside from the perspective of an executing application program. A logical address may be different from the physical address due to the operation of an address translator or mapping function. Such mapping functions may be, in the case of a computer memory architecture, a memory management unit (MMU) between the CPU and the memory bus. There may be more than one level of mapping. For example, on multiprocessor configurations of the IBM S/360, S/370 and successors, IBM distinguishes among #Virtual address seen by the program #Real address, the result of translating a virtual address #Absolute address, the result of mapping a real address using a low-storage prefix assigned to each CPU. Computer memory The physical address of computer memory banks may be mapped to different logical addresses for various purposes. In a system supporting virtual memory ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
