User talk:Guy Harris/Archives/2021/08

Execute instruction

Thanks for your improvements to Execute instruction! A few questions:

• Why are you italicizing some reference manuals but not others (e.g. the CDC 924)?
• The 'cite manual' template doesn't link the s.v. term correctly -- how should that be done?
• 'cite web' doesn't seem to be appropriate for the Holloway paper. In particular, it puts the technical report number after the page number, which I think is wrong in every bibliographic standard. What would be a more appropriate template?

This is why I (lazily) prefer writing out bibliographic references, though I recognize the advantages of templates....! --Macrakis (talk) 15:26, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@Macrakis:

"Why are you italicizing some reference manuals but not others (e.g. the CDC 924)?" At least in the case of the 924 manual, no good reason - I fixed it.

"The 'cite manual' template doesn't link the s.v. term correctly -- how should that be done?" If it's possible to link directly to the section on "PURE", so that the user can follow the link and go directly to "PURE" without having to scroll or search through the page, the right thing to do would be to use section-url= to link to that section. If it's not possible to link to the section on "PURE", then the right thing to do would be not to have any text that links to that section, as that would be misleading - you might link to the page as chapter 24, "System Programming", of the manual, but, as the reader is obliged to scroll down to, or search for, PURE to find the relevant part of the page, linking to the page as "PURE" wouldn't warn them that the link won't take them directly to the relevant part of the page. (BTW, "s.v." is probably obscure enough that, if the intent is to say "look for the word "PURE"", something more direct and less Latin should probably be chosen.)

"In particular, it puts the technical report number after the page number" The paper itself says "Hardware Memo 2" on one line and "PDP-10 Paging Device" on the line after that, so the best thing to do is probably to have the title for the reference be something such as "Hardware Memo 2 - PDP-10 Paging Device". I've done that. Guy Harris (talk) 19:38, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

I'm not terribly happy with that solution, since "Hardware Memo 2" is not part of the title, but a tech report type and number. It would be nice if Template:Cite techreport were better, but it's not worth the effort to fix it. --Macrakis (talk) 21:41, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

Sources for instruction set manuals

Thanks again for adding better sources for instruction set manuals. Is there some good bibliography of these that you're drawing from? I'd have thought that Comparison of instruction set architectures would include such references, but it's incredibly incomplete (no IBM 7090, no SDS 940, no PDP-1, etc.) and doesn't include references. Should we fill that article out, or is there some better article? --Macrakis (talk) 21:41, 1 August 2021 (UTC)

@Macrakis: I'm just poking around Bitsavers to see what they have; it's really a great resource for older computer and component manuals. Guy Harris (talk) 22:39, 1 August 2021 (UTC)