Subj : Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing
To   : Chris Townley
From : The Natural Philosopher
Date : Sat Aug 31 2024 09:59:39

On 31/08/2024 00:26, Chris Townley wrote:
> 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!
>
Were they?
I dont think they got any faster..

--
"Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social
conventions is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the
windows of my apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.) "

Alan Sokal

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
 * Origin: Agency HUB, Dunedin - New Zealand | Fido<>Usenet Gateway (3:770/3)

.