The HP 9100A desktop calculator was an incredible piece of engineering. It basically implemented a VLIW processor without any digital IC logic - it had a 4K ROM carved into a 12-layer circuit board (needless to say the yields sucked!) It used a CRT as a 3-line 8-segment display!
Tom Osbourne's initial work on ASM sounds quite interesting, although I haven't found all the details yet. http://www.hp9825.com/html/osborne_s_story.html - I'd figure a lot of this got into current design, hopefully!
Doing some more reading - Woz used these techniques on Apple Integer Basic and the Disk II. (Makes sense, since he *did* work for HP)
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programming ideas:
- *actually* passing a variable/object along, so it only has one "owner" at a time.
- making a state machine language that gets 'compiled' into straight C. already thinking of doing this for register definitions etc...
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