Post by Robotman on Feb 15, 2007 9:48:39 GMT 10
It's taken me about 2 years, but I finally figured out that the AVR people and the PIC people aren't the first lot to be so polarized about which "CPU" is better.
Back when I was a lad (circa 1985, I was only 16 then) we had the Z80 and the 6502 microprocessors. (Of course, these jobbies were around a long time before then, but who's telling the story here - me, or you?) Anyway, which one was better? The 6502 of course, hands down. Unless, maybe, you were in the Z80 camp, because we all know the Z80 was semi-16 bit and could do a DOS (pah, CP/M whatever); but the 6502 could do games better, didn't you know?
So here we have the 6502 contenders:
Commodore 64 / BBC Model B / Apple IIe / NES.
And then the Z80 contenders:
Spectrum / TRS-80 / Microbee / MSX / Amstrad / Gameboy (a little later, admittedly).
You've got a few more choices with the Z80, but which CPU made it? The CPU in the games machines of course, with Nintendo using both the 6502 and a cut-down Z80 clone at various times. SO, NOBODY WON THE WAR - AND THE WAR WAS LONG AND HARD. It was a pointless war. Mostly because bloody Intel won out with their super crappy x86 architecture. (Damn you IBM! Damn you Motorola!) I've being programming assembler for a long time and believe me when I say the nicest CPU I ever laid my hands on was the 68000...
And now it's the same thing over again in the Noughties as it was in the Eighties. Here we have Atmel, Microchip, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Cypress, and maybe Parallax all in the mix. And of course all the different stoopid sites dedicated to one uC or the other, starting the pointless war all over again.
Why am I tirading like this? Buggered if I know... Oh yes. I remember now. It was because I finally absorbed the www.avrfreaks.net ad-link on DAAR's (that's "Dingo's Australian Amateur Robotics") main page after all this time and it reminded me of similar things all those years ago...
On a different note, I could do a search but I think this time I will be like a boob and let somebody else's brain do my thinking for me (like a billion other boobs on the Internet do everday) and ask if anyone can remember the title of a book in which one chapter was called "The Case of the Missing NAND Gate". It was a book about the building of one of Data General's minis. I read it in High School (yep, in the mid-1980's) and wished now that I had never returned it to the library - the story was great for the mix of computer and electronics all written in a non-technical, but technical, way. It was a story about the people, but with the luring aura of the tech. If anybody (in Australia only) might have a copy they wish to sell...
Cheers for now
Rod
P.S. You guys were way too slow, so I searched for the book myself. Here's a Wikipedia entry about it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
Back when I was a lad (circa 1985, I was only 16 then) we had the Z80 and the 6502 microprocessors. (Of course, these jobbies were around a long time before then, but who's telling the story here - me, or you?) Anyway, which one was better? The 6502 of course, hands down. Unless, maybe, you were in the Z80 camp, because we all know the Z80 was semi-16 bit and could do a DOS (pah, CP/M whatever); but the 6502 could do games better, didn't you know?
So here we have the 6502 contenders:
Commodore 64 / BBC Model B / Apple IIe / NES.
And then the Z80 contenders:
Spectrum / TRS-80 / Microbee / MSX / Amstrad / Gameboy (a little later, admittedly).
You've got a few more choices with the Z80, but which CPU made it? The CPU in the games machines of course, with Nintendo using both the 6502 and a cut-down Z80 clone at various times. SO, NOBODY WON THE WAR - AND THE WAR WAS LONG AND HARD. It was a pointless war. Mostly because bloody Intel won out with their super crappy x86 architecture. (Damn you IBM! Damn you Motorola!) I've being programming assembler for a long time and believe me when I say the nicest CPU I ever laid my hands on was the 68000...
And now it's the same thing over again in the Noughties as it was in the Eighties. Here we have Atmel, Microchip, Texas Instruments, Motorola, Cypress, and maybe Parallax all in the mix. And of course all the different stoopid sites dedicated to one uC or the other, starting the pointless war all over again.
Why am I tirading like this? Buggered if I know... Oh yes. I remember now. It was because I finally absorbed the www.avrfreaks.net ad-link on DAAR's (that's "Dingo's Australian Amateur Robotics") main page after all this time and it reminded me of similar things all those years ago...
On a different note, I could do a search but I think this time I will be like a boob and let somebody else's brain do my thinking for me (like a billion other boobs on the Internet do everday) and ask if anyone can remember the title of a book in which one chapter was called "The Case of the Missing NAND Gate". It was a book about the building of one of Data General's minis. I read it in High School (yep, in the mid-1980's) and wished now that I had never returned it to the library - the story was great for the mix of computer and electronics all written in a non-technical, but technical, way. It was a story about the people, but with the luring aura of the tech. If anybody (in Australia only) might have a copy they wish to sell...
Cheers for now
Rod
P.S. You guys were way too slow, so I searched for the book myself. Here's a Wikipedia entry about it:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine
)
Thank you.
