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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.sys.raspberry-pi
Subject: Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing
Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2024 22:53:58 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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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

-- 
I would rather have questions that cannot be answered...
....than to have answers that cannot be questioned

Richard Feynman