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from the an-organization-of-very-special-registers dept.
http://www.righto.com/2019/10/how-special-register-groups-invaded.html
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this blog post, I uncover how special register groups went from an obscure feature in the Honeywell 800 mainframe to appearing in the Washington Post.
While researching old computers, I found a strange definition of "Central Processing Unit" that keeps appearing in different sources. From a book reprinted in 2017:1
"Central Processor Unit (CPU)—Part of a computer system which contains the main storage, arithmetic unit and special register groups. It performs arithmetic operations, controls instruction processing and provides timing signals."
At first glance, this definition seems okay, but a few moments thought reveals some problems. Storage is not part of the CPU. But more puzzling, what are special register groups? A CPU has registers, but "special register groups" is not a normal phrase.
It turns out that this definition has been used extensively for over half a century, even though it doesn't make sense, copied and modified from one source to another. Special register groups were a feature in the Honeywell 800 mainframe computer, introduced in 1959. Although this computer is long-forgotten, its impact inexplicably remains in many glossaries. The Honeywell 800 allowed eight programs to run on a single processor, switching between programs after every instruction.3 To support this, each program had a "special register group" in hardware, its own separate group of 32 registers (program counter, general-purpose registers, index registers, etc.).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by istartedi on Thursday October 24 2019, @04:50PM (6 children)
Now this, this is a meme [wikipedia.org] in the original sense. Kids today probably think memes are just pictures with texts that spread virally and are recognized as such. Nope. A meme can be any quantity of information that spreads and may or may not be recognized.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @05:06PM (4 children)
Yeah, language and meaning evolve. Welcome to the human species!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @06:41PM (3 children)
Replace "evolve" with "degenerate" as the idiots hear a word and start using it **irregardless** without knowing what it means.
/s
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @09:40PM (2 children)
But doesn't that beg the question as to how they could loose the original meaning?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 24 2019, @09:42PM (1 child)
I'm not falling for it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 27 2019, @06:38PM
Smart - there fucking with you.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 25 2019, @04:09AM
It's sad that the pronunciation on the page is wrong. Or, do they pronounce memo, meemoh?