On August 24, Adrian Vickers wrote:
> >Something which (as you'll come to discover if you hang around on
> >classiccmp) I don't care much about. It is certainly well down with
> >respect to functionality.
>
> That's fair enough. Personally, I doubt any of the older computers are
> *truly* elegant internally - there was too much learning going on. I'm not
> even sure if it's true of modern computers either.
>
> Of course, you'll prove me wrong now... ;)
I dunno about that. In the past 24 hours, I've worked on the
innards of an SGI Onyx, an AlphaServer 2100A, and a PDP11/34a. I'll
take the 25-year-old PDP11 over any of them, physical design wise.
Having seen the inside of a recent PeeCee a few weeks ago, there's
NOTHING elegant going on there.
Now a Cray T90 (a relatively recent Cray vector supercomputer) with
its motorized zero-insertion-force connectors...now THAT'S elegant.
But it could afford to be.
> However, whilst I like the idea of learning embedded systems, I'll probably
> start simple and use a Z80 or similar - I can't (yet) think of anything
> where I'd use some super-fast chip. Incidentally, what's with these PIC
> chips? They seem to be very popular at the moment.
PIC chips kick butt. They're wonderful. I use the CCS C compiler,
which is very nice and comes with LOTS of example code in the form of
"drivers" for various popular chips (I2C EEPROMs, Dallas Semiconductor
serially-interfaced RTC chips, iButtons, etc) that have proven
extremely useful. It also directly controls the PicStart programmer
as well as a few others.
The downside to the CCS C compiler is that it runs under Windoze...not
having any (and not wanting any) Windoze crap here, I fired up a copy
of VirtualPC on my G4 Mac; it runs nicely under that.
There are a LOT of different PIC chips available, from the older
16C54 to the incredibly popular 16F84 (the only one anyone ever hears
about, rather stupidly IMO because there are MUCH better ones), to the
16C745 with an on-chip USB interface.
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire
Laurel, MD
Received on Fri Aug 24 2001 - 09:40:58 BST