Texas Instruments’ Biggest Blunder: The TMS9900 Microprocessor
My first job out of college was to write a polygon fill routine for the TMS34010 graphics processor. I developed a love for it's clean 32-bit risc architecture ... it was even bit addressable with a flat address space. I actually loved programming in assembly language ... you could fit most subroutine arguments in registers.. use any of 32 registers you pleased.<p>Later I did some 8086 assembly programming. I learned why a generation of programmers hate assembly... only a few special purpose registers, segmented memory, long list of nonorthogonal instructions, ... yuck<p>I blame the general aversion for assembly programming to the choice of using the 8086 for PC's.