00:00 <cmtptr> gals

00:01 <cmtptr> we used vhdl

00:01 <cmtptr> that's the only sort of hdl programming i've done

00:01 <cmtptr> maybe i should get into that again

00:34 <dave0> maw

00:40 <KipIngram> wam

00:41 <KipIngram> Yessir - 22V10's rocked.

00:41 <KipIngram> I did a paper design once of a Forth processor core totally built with 22V10's.

00:42 <KipIngram> Hardware stack, got the instruction set crafted (32 five bit opcodes) and got the equations for the instruction set to fit in a batch of 22V10's.

00:42 <KipIngram> But as with so many of my personal projects - never got it built.

00:42 <KipIngram> I did go so far as buying several tubes of 22V10's from Digikey, though - they're still in the garage somewhere.

00:44 <KipIngram> Had to put the signals on the right pins - some of them have more OR terms supported than others.

00:45 <KipIngram> For those of you unfamiliar, the pattern in those devices was that each term could be an AND combination of all of the inputs, with either polarity chosen. But each pin only supported a limited number of such terms for the OR operation.

00:45 <KipIngram> Like 6-9 in the 22V10.

00:45 <KipIngram> iirc

00:50 <KipIngram> It was a fun time, as companies just kept figuring out how to offer more flexible programmable interconnects for those things. The gradually you started to be able to have internal state bits, and so on. Eventually it just "blurred into" FPGAs.

08:46 <KipIngram> Ok, wrote a primitive I'll call (block). It's intended to be the first tihng block calls, and it very rapidly determines if the requested block is already resident. If it is, it returns the buffer address in TOS. If the block isn't resident, it pushes a 0 to the stack.

08:47 <KipIngram> So it's designed to be used like so:

08:47 <KipIngram> : block (block) 0>; ... Forth to read block in ... ;

08:47 <KipIngram> If I'm going to have to read the block in, I'm not nearly so concerned about speed. I don't want to write the whole thing in assembly.

08:49 <KipIngram> But this is set up so that I will allocate a RAM region for the buffers. The first section of that will be a set of four-byte fields that call out which block is resident in each of the buffers, and whether it's dirty or not. Then the buffers themselves will follow, 4kB each. I can have any power of two for my buffer count, which I'll select by hard-coded constants in the primitive.

08:50 <KipIngram> Could be four on a small system, or say 256 on a large system.

22:47 <dave0> maw