Thanks for the suggestions, all --- more than I was expecting! I have plenty of reading waiting for me now, but I hope people won't let that stop them from sharing other examples.
Cheers, --Tom On Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 6:08 PM Josh Dersch <dersc...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 5:38 PM Tom Stepleton via cctalk < > cctalk@classiccmp.org> wrote: > >> Hello, >> >> For the sake of illustration to folks who are not necessarily used to >> thinking about what computers do at the machine code level, I'm interested >> in collecting examples of single instructions for any CPU architecture >> that >> are unusually prolific in one way or another. This request is highly >> underconstrained, so I have to rely on peoples' good taste to determine >> what counts as "interesting" here. >> > > I'll submit the Xerox Alto, with its extensions to the base DG Nova > instruction set. It included "CONVERT", used to render font glyphs to the > screen, and of course the legendary "BITBLT" for transferring bitmaps > across arbitrary bit boundaries. Both of these were complicated > operationst, and the latter revolutionized computer graphics... > > See p. 18 and 22 of > http://bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/alto/AltoHWRef.part1.pdf. > > (The Three Rivers PERQ included a similar "RASTEROP" instruction in its > repertoire, which was similar to BITBLT but also allowed for various > logical operations to be applied to the source and destination.) > > - Josh > > >
