Hi,
I was suddenly really curious if an arduino can be used as a computer.
Those really old PCs were about as powerful as the TI-84s we use today in math.
I'm wondering if an arduino, a powerful one, like the due or M0, can be used as a computer like the appleII.
I just wiki'd it and the cheapest apple 2 had a whopping 4kb memory, 140kb storage, and 2mhz clock speed.
The arduino M0 pro has 32kb memory, 256kb storage, and 48Mhz clock speed.
It's amazing how something 1,298 dollars(equivalent to 5,000 now) is now more powerful but cheaper at only 50 bux.
Anyways just wondering, can an M0 be a computer that runs a full OS with gui?
BTW the due is double the M0.
I really wish someone can answer this question im just really curious
Sure, the performance would suck, but i would expect that one could probably with enough work achieve that.
It would be dumb as hell to do that with an Arduino though, at least for practical purposes.
The Raspberry Pi has far more computing resources, and is price competitive with an arduino uno (or with a cup of coffee if you live near a Microcenter - they routinely run a special where you can get a pi zero for $1), and already has a well maintained and capable unix-based OS available for it.
Don't forget that the Apple 2 did not stand alone. It had a disk drive (floppy), and had some video management hardware, scanning the video memory to CRT. An arduino alone would be exhausted by the peripheral tasks that weren't actually handled in the venerable old 6502.
I'm wondering if an arduino, a powerful one, like the due or M0, can be used as a computer like the appleII.
Sure. An 84MHz Due is much faster than old personal computers, and has more RAM memory as well (not even counting the flash.) As jrdoner points out, most of those old computers had a lot of "clever" (and/or expensive) hardware in addition to the CPU.
The big problem is that those old computers were pretty awful by today's standards. Maybe they did OK with their 280×192, 6 color graphics (Apple ][) run as a 24 line by 40 column text display, but expectations have changed (just a bit, as I contemplate 4k displays for the holidays...)
IIRC, someone managed to run CP/M on a arduino-sized AVR chip, INCLUDING the 8080 emulation.
(http://hackaday.com/?s=cpm+avr)