and the 68k chip was re-microcoded to become the "micro ibm 360" for ibm
(no doubt at great profit!), i.e. a micro that ran the instruction set
of the old ibm 360, which i briefly used myself in high school via
punched cards.

William Chops Westfield wrote:
>
> On Monday, Jun 7, 2004, at 14:18 US/Pacific, Charles Craft wrote:
>
> >
> > I guess now that processors are chips instead of boards there isn't
> > any microcode firmware.  It's all hardwired logic etched/plated into
> > the silicon.
> >
> The vax postdated a lot of microprocessors, and a lot of micros had
> microcode for quite some time.  The well-respected 68000 had both micro
> and nanocode, IIRC.  Things based on bitslice components (with explicit
> user-provided microcode) survived into the 90s, at which point they
> started calling them "VLIW" and "reconfigurable core" machines instead.
> Things like the motorola QUICC chips have "microcode" for their
> auxilliary processors (comm, timer, etc.)
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