Octocontrabass wrote:
zesterer wrote:
- IRQs?
Yes. I'm not sure I could name any CPU architectures that
don't have IRQs.
Several early architectures did, before they were actually invented in the mid-1950s. According to Wikipedia, hardwired, special-purpose interrupts were first used on the
Univac 1103A as an optimization, but as a general design principle they didn't really exist until the early 1960s, in the
IBM Stretch (again according to Wikipedia). I don't know of any microprocessor in general use that didn't other than maybe the
VIPER (it was designed for 'provably stable operation', and had foregone other things such as a hardware stack on the basis that they were "inherently unreliable", supposedly).
The
Ceres workstation didn't use interrupts - the CPU it was based on, the NS32032, did support them, but the interrupt lines were disabled because Wirth decided he didn't like the idea of interrupts after he had trouble with the interrupt logic on the
Lilith. He argued that the problems arising from the non-determinism they created were more of a drag on performance (sue to added hardware and the need for the software to be reentrant, among other things) than polling did, and that it was took great a source of instability in any case - but then, AFAIK he also banned any use of languages other than
Oberon itself in the
operating system of the same name which it was used with, and required that the compiler automatically insert 'voluntary' sleeps into the application programs, so make of that what you will.