Definitions: Microcontroller, Single Board Computer, et al.

[DiTBho]

OT:

US stores wouldn't ship to Russia, and the Russian distributors were only set up to sell to businesses not individuals!

Sometimes the world feels really small, and offers funny tales. I think this is one of them.

The previous owner lives in Ulyanovsk, a city located on the Volga River 705 kilometers east of Moscow,  the birthplace of Vladimir Lenin. We met on a Russian / English forum dedicated to the Sony-Playstation1 hacks because Ecosia (a searching engine similar to Google) reported a post in their marketplace. So I contacted "him" via PM and found out that -1- he is a she (you cannot know from a nickname, even in Matrix Neo thought "Trinity" was a guy-nickname) and that -2- we have a couple of mutual friends located in Republic of Estonia and Sweden.

Hackers? simply enthusiasts? how could we define ourselves? mumble ...  I don't really know, I don't like labels and and it probably doesn't matter, what really matters is that Estonia is a developed country, with a high-income advanced economy, and I am so lucky to know a couple of guys and girls located in Tallinn and Tartu, the two urban areas from which people worldwide ship a lot of things.

Estonia is a member of the European Union, the Eurozone, and it's still commercially close to Russia, but also to Finland and Sweden. It's is really a strategic place.

The Russian girl told me he about a forwarding: USA (Texas) -> Estonia (a friend of her, forwarded to) -> Estonia-> Russia

Now you can understand why the S / H was so expensive for me, that package has moved a lot, from west to east, from one culture to another, and something tells me it won't stop here 

[brucehoult]

Estonia is a member of the European Union, the Eurozone, and it's still commercially close to Russia, but also to Finland and Sweden. It's is really a strategic place.

Tallinn is interesting. As captain of a team winning a prize (actually *two* prizes [1]) in the 2005 ICFP Programming Contest, I was invited to attend the ICFP conference in Tallinn to collect the prizes. It was a little far to go from New Zealand, so my team-mate from Berlin attended instead.

A dozen years later I was living in Moscow and went to Helsinki and Tallinn for a weekend (by train).

One thing that surprised me there was that even so long after 1991, and with Estonia being probably the most successful and entrepreneurial of the former Iron Curtain countries, my very bad Russian was much more useful to me there than English was.

There is a very interesting submarine in the maritime museum in Tallinn. It was built in England and used by the Estonian navy before WWII. Later it was a part of the USSR Baltic fleet, before being returned to Estonia when Estonia gained independence. TI found the various signs and instrument markings inside interesting because some are in English, some in Estonian, and some (often crudely scratched or painted on) are in Russian.


[1] http://icfpc.eecs.northwestern.edu/

[I wanted a rude username]

Just don't call an SBC a minicomputer.

[David Hess]

Back in 1976, Intel introduced the SBC 80/10, which held an 8080 microprocessor, up to four 8708 1kB EPROMs, 1kB of static RAM, and serial & parallel I/O. This was labelled (on the PCB!) as SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER 80/10. This, I believe, is the origin of the term.

The Intel SBC that I remember from that area with the same or similar configuration was the PL-881, but I could not find anything online about it.  It might have used the 8085 and 2716 by then which was a great improvement because only +5 volts was required instead of multiple supply voltages.