> On Sep 6, 2023, at 12:48 PM, Paul Koning via cctalk <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
> The weird case of the 11/05 is because the general registers are assigned
> addresses 177700 through 177707 for R0 through PC, so R1 is at 177701 even
> though it's a word wide. On most models those addresses only work from the
> operator console, but on the 11/05 they are also visible from the program.
> And by special microcode hack ("just because they could", says ABC) if the PC
> is in that range it increments by 1.
This was on the tip of my tongue because I was actually just debugging these
very bits of microcode on a GT40 (which Scott Swazey will be demoing at VCFMW
running “Lunar Lander” if it survives the journey there by car!)
The ALU B-leg input in the data paths on this CPU has a selection to generate
constant +1. In the usual cases, where the microcode needs +2 to be added to
something, the additional +1 comes from a microcode field bit and is added in
at the ALU least-significant-bit-slice carry input. There is additional
circuitry to inhibit this carry input in special cases like internal register
address decodes, etc.
On our GT40, we had a microcode PROM failure which took out this very carry
source bit. Thus our GT40 PC was incrementing by just one _incorrectly_ in
most cases where it should have been incrementing by two. Quite a coincidence
that your question came up soon after dealing with this :-)
—FritzM.
