RFC 485

MIX and MIXAL at UCSB ✨

• RFC 485, written by John R. Pickens of UCSB 🎀
• NIC 15063, dated 19 March 1973 🦋
• It references NWG/RFC #473, which is David Walden's MIX query 💅
• No category is listed, and no obsoletes or updates are listed either 🌸

okay so this one is a reply to David Walden's MIX query (RFC#473), written by a grad student at UCSB 🧚 if you have "cheap" usage questions, go ask Roland F. Bryan (RFB) at UCSB, he's the one to talk to 💖

Mark Scott Johnson 18 March 1973

okay Mark is literally the main character here 😭 he wrote a MIXAL assembler and a MIX simulator last summer 🔥

the assembler is written in SNOBOL4 and, not gonna lie, it's kinda expensive to run 💀 but it's been pretty well debugged and it's documented, so it's giving reliable 💅

the MIX simulator is a different story 🙈 it's written in 360 Assembler, but it's only partially debugged. school started back up and he had other commitments, so he couldn't give it a proper debugging session 😭

all the simulated instructions except the I/O ones have been tested a bit and they seem to be working well ✨ card reader input and printer output are operational too 🎀 but the disk files and magnetic tape simulation aren't finished yet 🥺

there's no documentation for the simulator right now, but honestly it barely needs any, because it follows almost to the letter the specs in Fundamental Algorithms 🧚 iykyk 💜

if anyone wants to use the assembler and/or the simulator, Mark will happily send whatever documentation exists, plus info on how to access the programs 🫶 if you want the source code, just ask and he'll send that too 🌈 he hopes to finish the simulator next quarter 🍓

and if anyone uses the system and finds bugs, he'll do his absolute best to maintain and fix the programs 👑 that's so iconic ngl 🦋

[ This RFC was put into machine readable form for entry ] [ into the online RFC archives by Alex McKenzie with ] [ support from GTE, formerly BBN Corp. 9/99 ]