Happy 50th Intel 4004

[ruffrecords]

It was fifty years ago that arguably the world's first microprocessor, the Intel 4004 appeared. Happy birthday

Cheers

Ian

 

[JohnRoberts]

I hate 8 bitters so can't imagine trying to code with only 4 bits. Seems like just yesterday.

JR

 

[ruffrecords]

I hate 8 bitters so can't imagine trying to code with only 4 bits. Seems like just yesterday.

JR

I love 'em and 4 bitters to. Small enough to get your head completely around and interesting enough to be able wring the last smidgen of performance out of a few Kbytes of memory. I remember back in the 90s designing a franking machine for Pitney Bowes. There was an 8 bitter for the transport control, a specialised LCD/keyboard 4 bitter for the user interface and and unspecified type in the encrypted card containing the money.

I hate these ridiculously cheap 32/64 bit ARM chips that are supposedly a RISC architecture but have oodles more instructions than any 8 bitter I remember.

Cheers

Ian

 

[JohnRoberts]

I guess RISC (reduced instruction set architecture) is all relative.

I have no problem with newer, faster, more powerful, cheaper digital technology..

I started coding with 8 bit and hated all the extra steps required to deal with more than 8 bit resolution. Coding 16 bit was a pleasure compared to that.

JR

 

[Matador]

I hate these ridiculously cheap 32/64 bit ARM chips that are supposedly a RISC architecture but have oodles more instructions than any 8 bitter I remember.

Why do you hate performance?

It was certainly nice to be able to have an entire ISA in your head, but these days, we can install Micropython, and have an interrupt driven control loop (even with coroutines) running with about 30 lines of code and about 15 minutes invested, even without having to compile anything. I honestly don't care which instructions are being used.

 

[ruffrecords]

Why do you hate performance?

I don't. I hate complexity I cannot possibly understand enough to use effectively. The only way to be able to use it at all is by abstraction which by definition leads to inefficiency

It was certainly nice to be able to have an entire ISA in your head, but these days, we can install Micropython, and have an interrupt driven control loop (even with coroutines) running with about 30 lines of code and about 15 minutes invested, even without having to compile anything. I honestly don't care which instructions are being used.

Which is possibly the ultimate abstraction. No need to have any knowledge whatsoever of what goes on under the hood.

Cheers

Ian