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[Reply #15 on:]

Still at least I didn't put all my money into buggy-whip shares.

Yep, not like the S&M business ever took off

[Reply #16 on:]

S&M...is that anything like M&Ms? I like them.

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Rob

[Reply #17 on:]

Yeah - only more leathery

[Reply #18 on:]

at least I didn't put all my money into buggy-whip shares.

I remember the first time I looked at a web browser (having already been involved with the networking industry for 10+ years by then.)  "Oh, this is just an easier UI to cover things like FTP that I already know how to use; I can safely ignore it."  :-)  Wrong.

[Reply #19 on:]

Man I remember getting a 4004 data sheet as a promo, I read it and couldn't for the life of me see how these microprocessors things could be useful for anything.

Wrong

Still at least I didn't put all my money into buggy-whip shares.

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Rob

That's nothing. I met the two Steve guys, Jobs and the Woz, in the mid 70s up in Rohnert Park. They were travelling around the Bay Area trying to sell/raise interest in their original Apple (1) populated PCB. They showed if off mounted is a homemade wood box, and a user had to supply their own keyboard and TV monitor. I looked it over and said this thing/these guys are going no where! Talking to him, I thought Woz was a real nice guy, a real nerd/hacker from the old school, but Jobs was even then was looking for something that would 'show me the money', that came through pretty clearly even back then.

Lefty

[Reply #20 on:]

Man I remember getting a 4004 data sheet as a promo, I read it and couldn't for the life of me see how these microprocessors things could be useful for anything.

Wrong

Still at least I didn't put all my money into buggy-whip shares.

_____
Rob

That's nothing. I met the two Steve guys, Jobs and the Woz, in the mid 70s up in Rohnert Park. They were travelling around the Bay Area trying to sell/raise interest in their original Apple (1) populated PCB. They showed if off mounted is a homemade wood box, and a user had to supply their own keyboard and TV monitor. I looked it over and said this thing/these guys are going no where! Talking to him, I thought Woz was a real nice guy, a real nerd/hacker from the old school, but Jobs was even then was looking for something that would 'show me the money', that came through pretty clearly even back then.

Lefty

I was at the Homebrew Computer Club meeting where the Steves first showed the Apple II. I worked at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and the meetings were in our auditorium. I had an Altair. Those were heady days!!

Jim

[Reply #21 on:]

Holy crap Lefty, that beats them all I think. For maybe a $100 you could have been America's richest man.

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Rob

[Reply #22 on:]

Holy crap Lefty, that beats them all I think. For maybe a $100 you could have been America's richest man.

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Rob

In my dreams. They weren't offering to sell a share of their company, heck at the time I don't know if they had even incorporated yet. The populated original apple board they were selling was priced at either $666.66 or $777.77, I forget which, and I thought that was pretty high even at that time. If they had offered to sell it as a bare unpopulated PCB and included a programmed ROM I might have given it a consideration. Where Steve and Steve really 'lucked' out was some very knowledgeable silicon business types took them under wing and showed them how to set up a real company, get some venture capital and design a more consumer friendly model, the Apple II, which took off immediately and everyone knows the rest of that story.

  I also worked for around 6 months for a start-up company called MicroPro in Rohnert Park, CA around 1977/78 which was trying to decide to sell CP/M application software only or package it with hardware. I was hired for the hardware side, but alas they decided to sell only software, so I left for more secure employment. They about a year or two later, as about their fourth software offering, started selling a word processor application that was to become pretty popular and made the founder(s) zillionaires, called.....Word Star.

Lefty

[Reply #23 on:]

Ah WordStar, I remember it fondly...well maybe not, but it did the job at the time. IIRC it was little more than a text editor with an inbuilt mark up language.

Two brushes with fame eh?

Unfortunately most of us geeks stay at the geek level unless we bump into a business type

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Rob

[Reply #24 on:]

There's times I used the CP/M line editor to change code because I could go faster but eventually WordStar got me too. It's like reading or TV, TV is less tiring.

When we got CP/M and I read the docs, I was so @#$&ing happy because we were also getting CB-80 and I could get away from number-line interpreter basic. Before that we had the Micropolis OS and Micropolis Basic to run our affordable business package. Those came free with the floppy drives and weren't worth a whole lot more. With CP/M I got TOOLS!

[Reply #25 on:]

8 bits is dead, long live 8 pins

Not sure if 8 bitters are dead - people have been saying that for years.

I think there is a case to be made that there is always a need for 8-bitters (or 16-bitters). The rush to 32-bitters is driven primarily by software development costs + time to market, in my view. A common platform allows better deployment and more robust code.

The new 810 from NXP is quite interesting, with its fully remapable pins. That's the one to watch for people wanting to use 8pdip packages.

[Reply #26 on:]

people have been saying that for years.

That's true and we're not there yet, but lately there are starting to be practical alternatives.

When a 32-bit chip is the same size and cost as the 8-bit chip and you don't need 5v (increasingly the case) or high current drive on all pins then why use an 8-bitter? Except for the "high current" part all the other things are currently the case, in fact LPCs are always cheaper than a similar AVR, sometimes by a lot.

I'm about to get a board made, it's a dual processor with an LPC1227 and an ATmega1284. These chips are very similar if you look at serial ports, pins, memory etc. But the LPC is half the price, twice the clock speed, probably 3-4x the execution speed, flat address space, no frigging with PROGMEM, FIFOs on the SPI and UARTs etc etc.

So why use the 1284 at all? Basically I want the board to be Arduino compatible and I reckon the 1284 has the best mix of features of all the AVR chips.

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Rob

[Reply #27 on:]

people have been saying that for years.

That's true and we're not there yet, but lately there are starting to be practical alternatives.

I'm pretty sure the 555 timer is still being made in DIP version and will be for some time in my opinion. It's my contention that the 555 is probably the IC chip with the longest continuous manufacturing run to date. What maybe going on forty years now?

When a 32-bit chip is the same size and cost as the 8-bit chip and you don't need 5v (increasingly the case) or high current drive on all pins then why use an 8-bitter? Except for the "high current" part all the other things are currently the case, in fact LPCs are always cheaper than a similar AVR, sometimes by a lot.

But 5 volt with pretty high current sink/source capacity is still a very handy 'feature' for a electronic hobbyist and can make the over all size of a project smaller by possibly not requiring extra drive components that a ARM based chip might require?

I'm about to get a board made, it's a dual processor with an LPC1227 and an ATmega1284. These chips are very similar if you look at serial ports, pins, memory etc. But the LPC is half the price, twice the clock speed, probably 3-4x the execution speed, flat address space, no frigging with PROGMEM, FIFOs on the SPI and UARTs etc etc.

So why use the 1284 at all? Basically I want the board to be Arduino compatible and I reckon the 1284 has the best mix of features of all the AVR chips.

I did buy a couple of the TH 1284 blank boards that Bob Makes. I've yet to try and populate one as I'm still playing around with the new Teensey 3.0 ARM board. I guess having lots of choices is the best of all possible states of being. Long live the DIP package.
Lefty

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Rob

[Reply #28 on:]

When a 32-bit chip is the same size and cost as the 8-bit chip and you don't need 5v (increasingly the case) or high current drive on all pins then why use an 8-bitter?

Generally true. But, hardware costs / performance is half the story (less than half actually). In many cases, especially for jobs still in the developed countries, the cost of porting or redeveloping software for a new platform is prohibitive. So you will continue to use 8-bitters just so you can reuse your old software.

For new jobs, it is true that you would be hard pressed to write for 8-bitters. Of what I do, 8-bit is less than 10%.

Except for the "high current" part all the other things are currently the case, in fact LPCs are always cheaper than a similar AVR, sometimes by a lot.

For an industrial application, the "high current" stuff is mostly a non-factor.

Having said that, I would venture that there will continue to be a market for 8-bit mcus, albeit much smaller than it is today. Professionally, writing for 8-bit mcus is a suicide.

[Reply #29 on:]

Professionally, writing for 8-bit mcus is a suicide.

Except that we're all using at least C nowadays, so writing for 8bit MCUs looks an awful lot like writing for 32bit MCUs.  Or 16bit MCUs.