| ▲ | retrac an hour ago | ||||||||||||||||
I'm reminded that chips like the Intel 8080 and Motorola 6800 were not intended to be general-purpose computers, and were originally designed mostly to be embedded controllers and as building blocks for "real" computers like terminal and disk controllers. I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. No MMU so no paging though. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | duskwuff 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
> I suppose in principle the RPi Pico could self-host its own OS and devel environment. 520 KB of RAM in the old days was plenty to fit an OS and compiler. With two cheap PSRAM chips and a bit of trickery, you can upgrade that to 32(.5) MB, which is certainly enough to run a small OS. In principle you can add even more memory with bank switching, but 32 MB is the limit for a flat address space. | |||||||||||||||||
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| ▲ | mikepurvis 28 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-] | ||||||||||||||||
uCLinux was a real thing for a good long while, though I think at this point real microprocessors are cheap, simple, and widely available enough that there hasn't been much need. | |||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | ant6n an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | ||||||||||||||||
Which “old days” would those be. Sounds like it would be 50 years ago | |||||||||||||||||
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