Frank M. Ramaekers wrote: >Where does one find a table of instructions a particular processor is capable >of?
I can't answer your question (though I suspect the answer is "You can't, trivially"), but it brings to mind a friend who was a sysprog back 35+ years ago, when the 4381 was new. His shop was looking to buy one, and some idiot IBMer said something to his boss along the lines of, "You know it's not a real 370". His boss got worried and said "What if our programs won't run?" "Then IBM will fix it." But that wasn't convincing, apparently. Next thing my friend knows, he's being assigned to *test the instruction set*. Now, LR, ST, MVC -- not so hard. I/O instructions? CONCS? Not so much (yes, I realize CONCS may not have existed on that machine, but you get my point). He said it was actually kind of fun/interesting, though ultimately pointless. Coincidentally, not long after that (and without knowing about it), I declined a post doing instruction set testing at Amdahl. I thought about it, decided it would be really interesting *once*, then be tedious as hell. No regrets. ...phsiii
