[En-Nut-Discussion] Amigas & other off topic war stories

[Harald Kipp]

Don,

At 08:52 28.07.2006 +1000, you wrote:

>1974 First HP ( of many ;-) in my stable - HP45

OK, as a poor student and far away from Silicon Valley, it
took some time after I could afford a calculator. Anyway,
I can beat it:
http://www.logikus.info/
I think I got it in 1968. Now everybody here knows how
rotten old I am. :-)


>~1980 TRS-80

After spending hours waiting for responses of those ancient
monsters called time scheduling mainframes, an old school
friend brought a TRS-80 from the US. I keyed in a simple print
loop and nearly fell off my chair when seeing this exceptional
output speed. A crucial experience.

Today's desktops have blindingly fast hardware. But like in the
old days, the power is shared. Not among timesharing users any
longer. Today you share with all those background processes.

When Dave Hudson started his
http://liquorice.sourceforge.net/
I had been most sceptic about TCP with 8-bit CPUs. Today
the ATmega128 easily transfers 250 kBytes/s, while the TCP
state machine is still far from highly optimized code.

Later I came in contact with Adam Dunkels (lwIP, uIP). Some
months ago I asked him, wether he would be interested in an
ARM based Ethernut. He replied something like: "Everything with
more than 16 address bits isn't really worth to look at." :-)

Harald