Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat(theregister.com) |
Memory is running out, and so are excuses for software bloat(theregister.com) |
I saw an article here that pointed out that there are keyboards today that have more computing power then the original Apple computer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_MCS-48:
“The 8049 has 2 KB of masked ROM (the 8748 and 8749 had EPROM) that can be replaced with a 4 KB external ROM, as well as 128 bytes of RAM and 27 I/O ports. The microcontroller's oscillator block divides the clock input frequency by three and then further divides the result into five machine states. Using the 11 MHz maximum crystal frequency will produce 0.73 MIPS of single-cycle instructions. Some 70% of instructions are single byte and single cycle ones, but 30% need two cycles or two bytes, so its typical performance would be closer to 0.5 MIPS.“
The Apple 1 had more RAM, but I think that, compute-wise, that’s already is fairly close to the performance of the 1MHz Apple 1.
and:
“The original IBM PC keyboard and the keyboard for its precursor the IBM System/23 Datamaster used an 8048 as its internal microcontroller”*
That Wikipedia page isn’t explicit about the difference between 8048 and 8049, but it could only be that the 8049 had twice the ROM and RAM (2k, respectively 128 bytes). If so, the PC keyboard already had a CPU with about the same computing power (but again: not the memory) as an Apple I in 1981.