Path: news.eternal-september.org!eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: bart <bc@freeuk.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: The integral type 'byte' (was Re: Suggested method for returning
 a string from a C program?)
Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2025 12:19:10 +0000
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On 28/03/2025 01:05, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> On 27.03.2025 12:14, bart wrote:
>> On 27/03/2025 02:24, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm speaking about all that inferior systems that had a comparably
>>> high price without a matching quality. And about years and years
>>> passing without vendors of such products changing that situation.
>>
>> I guess ... you're talking about either the IBM PC hardware or MS
>> software, or both? (Although PCs weren't expensive.)
> 
> Here PCs were expensive; a friend of mine bought one for ~8000 DM,
> IIRC, (compare that to 2000 DM for a Commodire PET; even the first
> Apple was expensive but not that expensive as the IBM PC).

There were inexpensive compared to traditional computer systems. So 
small businesses could afford them and later people used them as home 
computers.

Competition in the form of clones brought down the price. (My company 
toyed with making our own clone, but we moved out of making computers 
ourselves.)

>> I've never used Basic. But it is one language I admire, even if it is
>> crude:
>>
>>    10 let a=0
>>    20 let a=a+1
>>    30 if a<1000000 then 20
>>    40 print a
> 
> Okay, you "admire" BASIC (and you found the 68000 CPU "wonderful");
> that tells a lot about your background and expertise.

What does it tell you, that I'm not as stuck-up as you are?

I admired Basic for its simplicity and accessibility.

(Actually, the first time I ever tried making a toy interpreter, it was 
cabable of running pretty much that program, but with a smaller limit. 
Written in Fortran and running on a PDP11, it managed 500 iterations per 
second IIRC.

My latest interpreter, not for Basic, can manage 400M iterations per 
second.)


> I seem to recall that elsewhere in the thread you were mentioning the
> number of transistors - I understood that as if you take that being
> an indication for a complexity, non-triviality, not being "primitive".
> If that is a correct interpretation of your argument I'd like to
> suggest considering that the number of molecules (necessary to build
> up these ~8000 transistors) is even larger.
> 
> Try for a moment to understand that the quality of a CPU architecture is
> not (for assembler programmers) something measured in transistors.

I've used discrete transistors, and discrete logic gates (where you got 
4 gates in one chip). So I can imagine those as practical building blocks.

There are so many transistors to one gate. And there are so many gates 
needed to create a single bit of register storage. You can see that 8000 
or 8500 transistors can quickly get used up!

So my point is that these CPUs being 'primitive' can be excused to some 
extent.

> If you mention 68000 and NS32032 playing in the same architectural
> league then it's hard for me to consider you a serious discussion
> partner.

You haven't revealed what exactly is the gulf between them. You've 
vaguely quoted elsewhere what somebody once told you.

So it's hard for me to consider /you/ as someone who knows what they're 
talking about.


> I won't discuss the details of CPU architectures with you here; but
> if you're really interested I suggest to inspect those two processors
> more thoroughly - there's papers and documents available online.

OK, but that won't tell me why /you/ think X is better than Y.

>>> [...]
>>>
>>> But that all was long ago and is meaningless today.
>>
>> I find I can learn a lot from how simple things were that long ago. The
>> early 80s was the golden age for that, getting away from mainframes and
>> complex OSes, to much more informal systems. Now it's worse than ever.
> 
> I'm not able two bring your two sentences together. - What is worse?


> Do you mean to qualify it as: mainframe era: bad, 1980's era: good,
> nowadays: bad again. - Is that what you wanted to say?

I'll give an analogy: going from working from a company, to becoming 
self-employed, to working for a company again which is now a 
mega-corporation.

Where do think an individual would get the most freedom?


> Lets say I have some background to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So I don't have any background? Building systems at the chip level, and 
building the software, the tools, the languages /and/ their 
implementations out of nothing doesn't give me any perspective?

But you do. OK.

> ("IT" means "information technology"; a common superordinate term to
> not enumerate all the subareas separately. - I'm sure you know that.)

I now what it stands for. An umbrella term used to wrap layers of 
obfuscation and gratuitous complexity around computer systems, so as to 
be able to make lots more money compared to keeping things simple and 
transparent.

(There was a famous IT project in the UK to provide a computer system 
for its health service, where the government spent £12,000,000,000 
before it was scrapped as it didn't work.

There was also the infamous 'track and trace' in 2020, which reportedly 
cost £37 billion, but that figure is disputed.

This is 'IT')