OT - Memory usage in days of yore

[Janice Caron]

On 10/04/2008, Steven Schveighoffer <schveiguy at yahoo.com> wrote:
>  > 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 :)

So did you write the firmware? If so, you had 8K to play with.

The ZX80's 16K ROM was pre-filled with its operating system, (the OS
with no name), so users only had the RAM to play with. There was only
one processor, and only one thread, and the display driver had to run
in the same thread as everything else, which led to a model of
operation whereby the ZX80 would display something, wait for user
input, and then the the screen would go fizzy while it processed the
input to produce the next output.


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

Yes, indeed. I wasn't kidding about Space Invaders. The guy that wrote
that must have been the most brilliant programmer ever. In just 256
bytes, his code contained an interrupt-driven display driver that kept
the display steady while smoothly animated aliens walked down the
screen dropping bombs on you. That was just absolutely incredible.

Maybe we should all forget D and go back to assembler?

Oh wait - garbage collector; templates; closures; FP... Let's not.