OT - Memory usage in days of yore

[Steven Schveighoffer]

"Janice Caron" wrote
> On 10/04/2008, Janice Caron wrote:
>> On 10/04/2008, Steven Schveighoffer 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! :-)
>
> That said, you still win. Ignoring the display, we both were left with
> 256 bytes of RAM, but the ZX80 had 16K of ROM, whereas your machine
> only had eight.
>
> What was this machine of which you speak?

It was just an ST7 microprocessor that was used to do out-of-band management 
of a server (power on, power off, sensor monitoring, run LCD front panel, 
etc.)

The crappy part is that I had multiple such chips on a system, which talked 
to chips on other systems in a rack, so not only did I only have a small 
space to work in, but all the wonderful multi-threading issues that 
clustering requires :)

I'm still amazed at the amount of code we could squeeze into those things :)

-Steve