10 Sep
2025
10 Sep
'25
1:45 p.m.
I did 8080 programming and had 16kb to play with.
I thought there would never be a program large enough that 1mb was needed. Hah
Sent from my iPhone
On Sep 10, 2025, at 13:41, Paul Koning via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
On Sep 10, 2025, at 1:34 PM, Jim Davis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Yep, 16 bits, or even 32 seemed like a lot, If you're writing asm, It is.
But like you alluded to, it's not good enough for the stuff we expect today,
That depends a lot on what sort of "stuff" you work with.
For various fun projects I use the Raspberry Pico, which is a 32 bit microcontroller with
1/4 or 1/2 MB of RAM, which is quite a lot. But a bunch of that work uses the PIO engines
-- basically programmable state machines that talk to the I/O pins. Those have 16 bit
instructions, and a 32 word program memory. No data RAM, just a couple of registers.
Quite powerful, though. One application is the DDCMP controller I published a while ago.
I'm thinking about making it talk Ethernet in software as the next exercise...
paul