Excessive ! trip down memory lane

[Platypus]

I noticed a post on here where there was somewhat excessive use of exclamation marks, which reminded me of an editor program I used to use on a Data General Nova when I were a lad. I recall most commands involving lots of exclamation marks.

Google reminds me that the editor was NSPEED and the O/S was called RDOS.

I remember rebooting the thing by entering octal commands on the front panel using switches then re-loading the O/S from paper tape.

Found the brochure here

(featuring such technology as 2k of memory!)

Now I feel old

[TheFaQQer]

Have a ! on me!

[threaded]

I remember writing micro-code instructions for the nova processor.

Great fun, people would ask what some bit of assembler did, and most of the subroutines looked really similar because they used the same op-codes, but did quite different things, because the instructions depended on the microcode loaded elsewhere.

Well, I got great joy from doing that kind of thing.