> Hand assembly was actually a common practice until 16-bit processors made 
> this too troublesome; with at most 256 opcodes to remember (although the 
> 6809[1] had prefix opcodes that made the following opcode take on a 
> different meaning), many 8-bit assembly programmers were perfectly capable 
> of reading and writing the opcodes directly from/to a memory listing.

With a RISC 32-bit processor it was pretty easy too.  The instructions were 
all 32-bit and all laid out in a similar way (first 5 bits for the 
instruction code, next 3 for conditional flags, next 3 groups of 4 bits for 
which registers to use, etc.  The OS had a handy disassembly function 
though, where you passed it the 32-bit opcode and it returned a string of 
assembler, of course most programs/debuggers made use of this so you rarely 
needed to actually decipher the bits.

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Nicolas Alvarez wrote:

> Clarification: you will NOT find a C64 in there.

Really? Nobody has modded their C64 to run this yet?

[You think I'm kidding???]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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> - Commodore 64 (6510 @ ~1 MHz)
> - ZX Spectrum (Z80 @ 3.5 MHz)
> - Pentium I @ 66 MHz
> - Pentium II @ 233 MHz
> - Pentium III @ 500 MHz
> - Pentium IV @ 4.0 GHz
> - Intel Core 2 Quad @ 3.0 GHz

No idea about the processing power of those, but yesterday I saw a 
Cray-1 supercomputer.

I say "supercomputer"... According to Wikipedia:

- 80 MHz clock.
- 160 MIPS theoretical peak.
- 136 MFLOPS typical.
- 250 MFLOPS peak (for heavily vectorised workloads).
- 8 MB RAM max.
- 5.5 tons.
- 115 kW for the basic system (NOT including cooling).

I'm having great difficulty finding numbers, but I'm told modern 
computers are measured in multiple GFLOPS rather than MFLOPS. And 
certainly they seem to hit tens of thousands of MIPS (although for 
radically different instruction sets that's not a teffically meaningful 
comparison).

It seems likely that my old laptop is more powerful that this 5.5-ton 
Freon-cooled monster.

I'm now trying to find out if my laptop out-powers the Cray-2. I still 
have a book somewhere claiming this to be "the world's most powerful 
computer"...

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> No idea about the processing power of those, but yesterday I saw a 
> Cray-1 supercomputer.

> I say "supercomputer"... According to Wikipedia:

> - 80 MHz clock.
> - 160 MIPS theoretical peak.
> - 136 MFLOPS typical.
> - 250 MFLOPS peak (for heavily vectorised workloads).
> - 8 MB RAM max.
> - 5.5 tons.
> - 115 kW for the basic system (NOT including cooling).

  On the other hand, we are talking about 1976 here. With regular desktop
computers we were talking about KMIPS and KFLOPS and a few kB of RAM at
most.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:14:20 +0100, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:

>Chambers wrote:
>
>> Heh... while I never used the original model, most of the schools where 
>> I lived used IIe's or later.  As the article says, there are *still* 
>> schools around that have labs full of them.
>
>Must be a regional thing... When I was at school, it was the BBC Micro - 
>and nothing else!

When I was in school, we weren't even allowed to use calculators never mind have

-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Warp wrote:

>   On the other hand, we are talking about 1976 here. With regular desktop
> computers we were talking about KMIPS and KFLOPS and a few kB of RAM at
> most.

Oh, sure, not debating that. It's just impressive to see how far we've come.

People still talk about requiring a "Cray supercomputer" to perform a 
given task. But it seems that the famous Cray-1 and Cray-2 were actually 
far less powerful than a typical desktop today. (My dad saw me looking 
at the Cray-1 and suggested using it just for POV-Ray. It seems to be 
this would actually be a rather bad idea...)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Must be a regional thing... When I was at school, it was the BBC Micro - 
>> and nothing else!
> 
> When I was in school, we weren't even allowed to use calculators never mind have


Oh, this was at my first school. We used the computer for writing 
things, and there was also a dragon-related "game" that was supposed to 
be educational in some mannar... Hey, we were only little. ;-)

The school I spent most of my years at did not allow electronic devices 
of any kind. We were also not allowed to watch TV because it was deemed 
"too violent". (Except that the older kids were allowed to watch the 
news - HOW IS THIS NOT VIOLENT???)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:

> People still talk about requiring a "Cray supercomputer" to perform a 
> given task. But it seems that the famous Cray-1 and Cray-2 were actually 
> far less powerful than a typical desktop today. (My dad saw me looking 
> at the Cray-1 and suggested using it just for POV-Ray. It seems to be 
> this would actually be a rather bad idea...) 

There was somewhere out there a Cray-2 (I think) you could log into via 
telnet and run apps. It had POV-Ray on it already, an older version (2.x 
or maybe 3.0) I ran a basic scene from the samples and was surprised at 
how long it actually took.

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Stephen wrote:
> When I was in school, we weren't even allowed to use calculators never mind have
> access to a computer. The youth of today … :)

Stephen, when you and I were in school, the slide rule was considered to
be cutting edge technology :-)

BTW Remind me to listen to the Kat when she suggests that going for a
drink with a bad back is not a good idea

John

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Mike Raiford wrote:

> There was somewhere out there a Cray-2 (I think) you could log into via 
> telnet and run apps. It had POV-Ray on it already, an older version (2.x 
> or maybe 3.0) I ran a basic scene from the samples and was surprised at 
> how long it actually took.

Heh. One of the developers working on the Glasgow Haskell Compiler 
commented off-hand that he had tried Haskell's STM implementation on a 
machine with 128 CPUs and it had achieved a good speedup.



...OK, WHERE the HELL do you buy something that has 128 CPUs in it?? O_O 
This information surely has a most direct relevance to all who worship 
POV-Ray...!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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