Subj : Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing
To   : The Natural Philosopher
From : Chris Townley
Date : Sat Aug 31 2024 00:26:59

On 30/08/2024 22:53, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
> On 30/08/2024 20:50, mm0fmf wrote:
>> On 30/08/2024 15:45, The Natural Philosopher wrote:
>>> On 30/08/2024 15:39, mm0fmf wrote:
>>>> On 30/08/2024 14:28, John Aldridge wrote:
>>>>> In article <20240829191334.570e88c7507598ffe5b28d87@eircom.net>,
>>>>> steveo@eircom.net says...
>>>>>>>>     Portable code should only rely on the standards not
>>>>>>>> implementations, some very weird possibilities are legal within the
>>>>>>>> standard.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Heh, yes. I worked for several years on a machine where a null
>>>>>>> pointer
>>>>>>> wasn't all bits zero, and where char* was a different size to any
>>>>>>> other
>>>>>>> pointer.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>     That rings vague bells, what was it ?
>>>>>
>>>>> Prime. It was word, not byte, addressed, so a char* had to be bigger.
>>>>>
>>>> I used a Prime750 at Uni. But only undergrad tasks in Prime BASIC
>>>> and some Fortran. It seemed quite fast at the time in timeshare mode
>>>> with plenty of undergrads using it. But the CPU was only as fast as
>>>> an 8MHz 68000!
>>>>
>>> That is the staggering thing. CPU performance in the mini era wasn't
>>> that hot at all.
>>>
>>> I see someone has made a Pi PICO emulate a range of 6502 based
>>> computers - apple II etc.
>>>
>>> I am fairly sure a PI Zero could outperform a 386 running SCO
>>> Unix...and that was pretty comparable with - if not better than - a
>>> PDP 11.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> The CPUs may not have had stunning performance but were generally
>> quite a bit quicker than the Z80/6502s of the day. The real
>> performance came from having disks and ISTR hardware assisted IO. i.e.
>> the CPU didn't have to poll or handle IRQs from each UART but there
>> was something helping. It's all so long ago now I forget the details.
>> What I do remember was it was around 1985 when someone lit the blue
>> touch paper and the performance of micros started rocketing.   Though
>> if you started 10 years before me there will have been something that
>> was when performance took off for you. I think everyone has some point
>> in their memory when things started to go whoosh!
>>
>> In 1989 I was writing Z80 assembler to control medical gear. All the
>> code took about 45mins to cross assemble and link on a Unix system
>> running on a Vax 11/730. In 1990 we got a 25MHz 80386 running DOS and
>> the same source took under 3mins to cross assemble and link.  The
>> bottleneck went from the time to build the code to the time to erase,
>> download and burn the EPROMS.
>>
> Yes. I was writing C and assembler for a 6809 cross complied on a PDP/11.
> We had PCS as serial terminals and text editors.
>
> Compile was very slow compared to on a PC.
>
> The thing was that until the 386 Intel CPUs didn't have the big boy
> features.  After that they did.
>
> Even an old IBM mainframe could be emulated under AIX on a PC.
> I did some work on a Vax running Unix too. Better, but still pretty awful
>

Vaxen were much better running VMS!

--
Chris

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