>> I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
>
> I really don't understand the relevance of that statement. It seems a bit rude to me. Is this some internet jargon with which I am unfamiliar? Maybe like trolling or flaming or something? I sense no ill will in this thread.

You seriously don't see the relevance?
I see you and others being cool about having less.
Only the post from Georg Wrede was interesting.
I'd rather see what kind of new technologies people currenly have.

> And there is a positive side to it. Though we were being nostalgic, in passing we were also pointing out how /much/ it's possible to do with only small amounts of memory. Modern compilers, for all their optimisation techniques, could still learn a lot from what the human brain was doing in the early eighties.

Personally I think that is an extremely obvious observation. But then again, my work is in artificial intelligence.

Janice Caron wrote:
> Saaa wrote:
>> Where the hell do you people live?
>> My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.
> 
> At last count, I own 28 computers.
> 
> All of them have less than 1 gigabyte of ram.
> Actually, even the total of all of them is
> less than 1.5G.

I suppose the next question would be, What are your hours and how much do you charge for admission? Sounds like an interesting museum.

(Side note, I have ~14 and individually except for my current workstations(2) and Server(1) all of them have under 128MBMB of ram, including a working mac 128k(and a fabulous external 20MB HDD))

Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> So this 8K ROM, 256 bytes of RAM chip is really a modern embedded microprocessor.  It had a built in i2c bus, SPI bus, 2 hardware timers, and 22 GPIOs.  And with 3 of those parts, I had to monitor i2c based sensor devices, run a watchdog, create a dynamically addressed protocol for an external i2c bus, read and write from an external EEPROM, and run a 2x16 LCD front panel with a 4 button interface.  I actually ran out of code space at one point, and had to 'invent' a new way of doing 8-bit pointers in a 16-bit address space in order to reduce the code so it would fit.

Last year I had an excellent list of firms that sold that kind of single-board "computers", and I lost it in a disk crash. You wouldn't happen to have a few pointers for me?

Saaa wrote:
>>>I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
>>
>>I really don't understand the relevance of that statement. It seems a
>>bit rude to me. Is this some internet jargon with which I am
>>unfamiliar? Maybe like trolling or flaming or something? I sense no
>>ill will in this thread.
> 
> 
> You seriously don't see the relevance?
> I see you and others being cool about having less.
> Only the post from Georg Wrede was interesting.

:-) Gee, thanks!

> I'd rather see what kind of new technologies people currenly have.
> 
> 
>>And there is a positive side to it. Though we were being nostalgic, in
>>passing we were also pointing out how /much/ it's possible to do with
>>only small amounts of memory. Modern compilers, for all their
>>optimisation techniques, could still learn a lot from what the human
>>brain was doing in the early eighties.
> 
> 
> Personally I think that is an extremely obvious observation. But then
> again, my work is in artificial intelligence. 
> 
> 

; D

> Oh dear, we live in the past.

Past?

I just spent the last 7 years writing code for a 1-MHz 8032.  On-chip it has 256 bytes of ram, 1/2 of which is directly accessible (like registers) and the other half is indirectly accessible.  It has a stack, but you can't index off of it so variables are either static or overlayed by the linker from the possible call-chains it can determine.

Still...  I had a fully operational TCP/IP stack in under 12KB (external RAM and ROM), including IPsec*, that could pass 1KB of data from a tcp app to the ethernet controller in about 8ms.

-- Brian


*IPsec was statically keyed and could do about 500B/sec throughput, if I remember correctly.

I wrote an SSL implementation just for fun...  It took about 10 minutes just to do the initial handshake.

"Georg Wrede"
> Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>> So this 8K ROM, 256 bytes of RAM chip is really a modern embedded microprocessor.  It had a built in i2c bus, SPI bus, 2 hardware timers, and 22 GPIOs.  And with 3 of those parts, I had to monitor i2c based sensor devices, run a watchdog, create a dynamically addressed protocol for an external i2c bus, read and write from an external EEPROM, and run a 2x16 LCD front panel with a 4 button interface.  I actually ran out of code space at one point, and had to 'invent' a new way of doing 8-bit pointers in a 16-bit address space in order to reduce the code so it would fit.
>
> Last year I had an excellent list of firms that sold that kind of single-board "computers", and I lost it in a disk crash. You wouldn't happen to have a few pointers for me?

Sorry :(  I wasn't in charge of acquiring such things, just in charge of programming them.

Plus, these were just chips.  We put them on boards we designed ourselves.

But I lost a disk once with 2 weeks of development work on it, and these guys were able to recover it for me:  http://www.drivesolutions.com/

-Steve