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digitalmars.D - OT - Memory usage in days of yore

reply "Janice Caron" <caron800 googlemail.com> writes:
On 10/04/2008, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote:
  I used to work with a device that had
  256 bytes of RAM and 8K of code space.  When working on that device, I
  learned how important it was to split common functionality into functions.
Pah! My ZX80 had *one K* of RAM. And three quarters of that was used for the display! (and you could still play Space Invaders on it). Young people today! :-)
Apr 10 2008
next sibling parent BCS <BCS pathlink.com> writes:
Janice Caron wrote:
 On 10/04/2008, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy yahoo.com> wrote:
 
 I used to work with a device that had
 256 bytes of RAM and 8K of code space.  When working on that device, I
 learned how important it was to split common functionality into functions.
Pah! My ZX80 had *one K* of RAM. And three quarters of that was used for the display! (and you could still play Space Invaders on it). Young people today! :-)
I've got you beat: ~127-256 bytes, code and data, end of story. and that's a modern computer http://www.rev-ed.co.uk/docs/picaxe_manual1.pdf pg 38 under program memory for type M chips. also see pg 40
Apr 10 2008
prev sibling parent reply "Saaa" <empty needmail.com> writes:
Where the hell do you people live?
My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.


  I used to work with a device that had
  256 bytes of RAM and 8K of code space.  When working on that device, I
  learned how important it was to split common functionality into 
 functions.
Pah! My ZX80 had *one K* of RAM. And three quarters of that was used for the display! (and you could still play Space Invaders on it). Young people today! :-)
Apr 10 2008
next sibling parent reply Georg Wrede <georg nospam.org> writes:
Oh dear, we live in the past.

By the time we go out of scope, you'll be at your top, all of a sudden 
encircled by a hord of those whose have not yet even come to scope. And 
you will find yourself telling war stories from the time computers had 
less than 8TB of RAM.

Saaa wrote:
 Where the hell do you people live?
 My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.
 
 
 
 I used to work with a device that had
 256 bytes of RAM and 8K of code space.  When working on that device, I
 learned how important it was to split common functionality into 
functions.
Pah! My ZX80 had *one K* of RAM. And three quarters of that was used for the display! (and you could still play Space Invaders on it). Young people today! :-)
Apr 10 2008
parent Brian White <bcwhite pobox.com> writes:
 Oh dear, we live in the past.
Past? I just spent the last 7 years writing code for a 1-MHz 8032. On-chip it has 256 bytes of ram, 1/2 of which is directly accessible (like registers) and the other half is indirectly accessible. It has a stack, but you can't index off of it so variables are either static or overlayed by the linker from the possible call-chains it can determine. Still... I had a fully operational TCP/IP stack in under 12KB (external RAM and ROM), including IPsec*, that could pass 1KB of data from a tcp app to the ethernet controller in about 8ms. -- Brian *IPsec was statically keyed and could do about 500B/sec throughput, if I remember correctly. I wrote an SSL implementation just for fun... It took about 10 minutes just to do the initial handshake.
Apr 11 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent reply Bill Baxter <dnewsgroup billbaxter.com> writes:
Saaa wrote:
 Where the hell do you people live?
 My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.
I think it's more a question of "when the hell" these people lived. :-) My first computer was an Apple ][+ with a massive 48K!
  I used to work with a device that had
  256 bytes of RAM and 8K of code space.  When working on that device, I
  learned how important it was to split common functionality into 
 functions.
Pah! My ZX80 had *one K* of RAM. And three quarters of that was used for the display! (and you could still play Space Invaders on it). Young people today! :-)
--bb
Apr 10 2008
parent reply "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:
"Bill Baxter" wrote
 Saaa wrote:
 Where the hell do you people live?
 My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.
I think it's more a question of "when the hell" these people lived. :-)
I never really got into computer programming until college, and I graduated in '99 :) So this 8K ROM, 256 bytes of RAM chip is really a modern embedded microprocessor. It had a built in i2c bus, SPI bus, 2 hardware timers, and 22 GPIOs. And with 3 of those parts, I had to monitor i2c based sensor devices, run a watchdog, create a dynamically addressed protocol for an external i2c bus, read and write from an external EEPROM, and run a 2x16 LCD front panel with a 4 button interface. I actually ran out of code space at one point, and had to 'invent' a new way of doing 8-bit pointers in a 16-bit address space in order to reduce the code so it would fit. It basically was a cheap part my company could use to create a very robust OOB management system, where peer units could detect and diagnose failures of other units. And I built all the code using a PC running Windows NT 4 with 256 MB of RAM :) But it was still a challenge, which I highly recommend to anyone who is used to writing code for modern-day computers with seemingly unlimited memory and resources. It seems the trend today is to use up memory faster than it can be increased... Vista is an abomination. Compact code is a thing of beauty :) -Steve
Apr 11 2008
parent reply Georg Wrede <georg nospam.org> writes:
Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 So this 8K ROM, 256 bytes of RAM chip is really a modern embedded 
 microprocessor.  It had a built in i2c bus, SPI bus, 2 hardware timers, and 
 22 GPIOs.  And with 3 of those parts, I had to monitor i2c based sensor 
 devices, run a watchdog, create a dynamically addressed protocol for an 
 external i2c bus, read and write from an external EEPROM, and run a 2x16 LCD 
 front panel with a 4 button interface.  I actually ran out of code space at 
 one point, and had to 'invent' a new way of doing 8-bit pointers in a 16-bit 
 address space in order to reduce the code so it would fit.
Last year I had an excellent list of firms that sold that kind of single-board "computers", and I lost it in a disk crash. You wouldn't happen to have a few pointers for me?
Apr 11 2008
parent "Steven Schveighoffer" <schveiguy yahoo.com> writes:
"Georg Wrede"
 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
 So this 8K ROM, 256 bytes of RAM chip is really a modern embedded 
 microprocessor.  It had a built in i2c bus, SPI bus, 2 hardware timers, 
 and 22 GPIOs.  And with 3 of those parts, I had to monitor i2c based 
 sensor devices, run a watchdog, create a dynamically addressed protocol 
 for an external i2c bus, read and write from an external EEPROM, and run 
 a 2x16 LCD front panel with a 4 button interface.  I actually ran out of 
 code space at one point, and had to 'invent' a new way of doing 8-bit 
 pointers in a 16-bit address space in order to reduce the code so it 
 would fit.
Last year I had an excellent list of firms that sold that kind of single-board "computers", and I lost it in a disk crash. You wouldn't happen to have a few pointers for me?
Sorry :( I wasn't in charge of acquiring such things, just in charge of programming them. Plus, these were just chips. We put them on boards we designed ourselves. But I lost a disk once with 2 weeks of development work on it, and these guys were able to recover it for me: http://www.drivesolutions.com/ -Steve
Apr 14 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent Georg Wrede <georg nospam.org> writes:
Saaa wrote:
 Where the hell do you people live?
 My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.
At last count, I own 28 computers. All of them have less than 1 gigabyte of ram. Actually, even the total of all of them is less than 1.5G.
Apr 10 2008
prev sibling next sibling parent reply "Saaa" <empty needmail.com> writes:
I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
Apr 10 2008
parent reply "Janice Caron" <caron800 googlemail.com> writes:
On 11/04/2008, Saaa <empty needmail.com> wrote:
 I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
I really don't understand the relevance of that statement. It seems a bit rude to me. Is this some internet jargon with which I am unfamiliar? Maybe like trolling or flaming or something? I sense no ill will in this thread. And there is a positive side to it. Though we were being nostalgic, in passing we were also pointing out how /much/ it's possible to do with only small amounts of memory. Modern compilers, for all their optimisation techniques, could still learn a lot from what the human brain was doing in the early eighties.
Apr 11 2008
next sibling parent Sean Kelly <sean invisibleduck.org> writes:
== Quote from Janice Caron (caron800 googlemail.com)'s article
 On 11/04/2008, Saaa <empty needmail.com> wrote:
 I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
I really don't understand the relevance of that statement. It seems a bit rude to me. Is this some internet jargon with which I am unfamiliar? Maybe like trolling or flaming or something? I sense no ill will in this thread. And there is a positive side to it. Though we were being nostalgic, in passing we were also pointing out how /much/ it's possible to do with only small amounts of memory. Modern compilers, for all their optimisation techniques, could still learn a lot from what the human brain was doing in the early eighties.
And cue the story of Mel: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html Sean
Apr 11 2008
prev sibling parent reply "Saaa" <empty needmail.com> writes:
 I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
I really don't understand the relevance of that statement. It seems a bit rude to me. Is this some internet jargon with which I am unfamiliar? Maybe like trolling or flaming or something? I sense no ill will in this thread.
You seriously don't see the relevance? I see you and others being cool about having less. Only the post from Georg Wrede was interesting. I'd rather see what kind of new technologies people currenly have.
 And there is a positive side to it. Though we were being nostalgic, in
 passing we were also pointing out how /much/ it's possible to do with
 only small amounts of memory. Modern compilers, for all their
 optimisation techniques, could still learn a lot from what the human
 brain was doing in the early eighties.
Personally I think that is an extremely obvious observation. But then again, my work is in artificial intelligence.
Apr 11 2008
parent reply Georg Wrede <georg nospam.org> writes:
Saaa wrote:
I'd rather see a pissing contest then erm.. well.. a crapping contest.
I really don't understand the relevance of that statement. It seems a bit rude to me. Is this some internet jargon with which I am unfamiliar? Maybe like trolling or flaming or something? I sense no ill will in this thread.
You seriously don't see the relevance? I see you and others being cool about having less. Only the post from Georg Wrede was interesting.
:-) Gee, thanks!
 I'd rather see what kind of new technologies people currenly have.
 
 
And there is a positive side to it. Though we were being nostalgic, in
passing we were also pointing out how /much/ it's possible to do with
only small amounts of memory. Modern compilers, for all their
optimisation techniques, could still learn a lot from what the human
brain was doing in the early eighties.
Personally I think that is an extremely obvious observation. But then again, my work is in artificial intelligence.
Apr 11 2008
parent "Saaa" <empty needmail.com> writes:
; D 
Apr 11 2008
prev sibling parent "Hans W. Uhlig" <huhlig clickconsulting.com> writes:
Janice Caron wrote:
 Saaa wrote:
 Where the hell do you people live?
 My old computer had 1gigabyte of ram.
At last count, I own 28 computers. All of them have less than 1 gigabyte of ram. Actually, even the total of all of them is less than 1.5G.
I suppose the next question would be, What are your hours and how much do you charge for admission? Sounds like an interesting museum. (Side note, I have ~14 and individually except for my current workstations(2) and Server(1) all of them have under 128MBMB of ram, including a working mac 128k(and a fabulous external 20MB HDD))
Apr 11 2008