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nostalgia of 386-level systems?!?
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rstofer:
I've got the Fortran source for PL/M.  I've written a lot of Fortran but not like that!
Gary Kildall was a genius!

I have the rest of the CP/M source as well but I always wanted PL/M.  Instead I got PL/I which is pretty nice.
DiTBho:

--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 01, 2022, 06:01:57 pm ---Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz?

--- End quote ---

6502 is of two order of magnitude simpler, and beauty to be programmed in assembly.
i386 is complex, its ISA is not elegant, and on the top of this, DOS is full of crappy BIOS function calls.

DiTBho:

--- Quote from: rstofer on April 01, 2022, 05:24:24 pm ---Remember, the first PC incantation of Unix was 386BSD and many flavors of PC Unix started with this version.  Note the '386'...

--- End quote ---

I am with Linux since v1.*, I still have here Caldera, Corel (crazy, but it existed), Suse, Debian, Slackware, ... and other fancy CDs and DVDs.

Times when internet worked with phone-coupled modem, you weren't able to "download" anything big (2x600MByte through a 4800bps phone-modem?!?) because it was too expensive, and you went to the newsstand to buy magazines with included CDs of Linux.

Those CDs were mostly i386-binaries, sometimes with the sources, usually you had to pay extra money to the young man at the newsstand for the CD-bonus.

The first time I compiled the entire Linux kernel and entire GNU user space from scratch was for a hacked MIPS-R3K router to function as a server (kernel 2.2.* gcc v2.*)

Since then, I abandoned x86 as much as I could  :D
DiTBho:

--- Quote from: rstofer on April 01, 2022, 06:16:55 pm ---best toys!

--- End quote ---

if you have to choose between a ti84(1) and a ti89(2), which one would you choose  :D?

(1) z80-based graphing programmable calculator, programmable in basic, C, assembly
(2) 68k-based graphing programmable calculator, programmable in basic, C, assembly
rstofer:

--- Quote from: DiTBho on April 02, 2022, 10:45:37 am ---
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 01, 2022, 06:01:57 pm ---Designing "vintage" stuff is a hobby as any other. Why would it make no sense to design a 386-based board when many still design 6502-based ones @1 MHz?

--- End quote ---

6502 is of two order of magnitude simpler, and beauty to be programmed in assembly.
i386 is complex, its ISA is not elegant, and on the top of this, DOS is full of crappy BIOS function calls.

--- End quote ---

That's because MS-DOS is a direct ripoff from CP/M and CP/M wanted to be able to abstract the hardware at the BIOS level.  In the early years I wrote a ton of BIOS code for different platforms with different hardware features but I never had to worry about the non-BIOS code and whether it would work.

I also did some work with 6502 adding hard drives to Apple IIs.  The 6502 was simple but perhaps too simple.  I thought it was harder to program than the 8080s but that may be because I didn't have as much experience with the chip and I certainly didn't have as many tools.

There are FPGA versions of the 6502 over at Opencores.
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