OT - Memory usage in days of yore

[Steven Schveighoffer]

"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