3 ms·

Hah... Through the first few sentences I kept wondering which wondrous architecture are we talking about, that "64-bit" memory chip is considered "vintage"...?

Hah... Through the first few sentences I kept wondering which wondrous architecture are we talking about, that "64-bit" memory chip is considered "vintage"...? It took me embarrassingly long to realize that it's not 64-bit bus, it's a 64-bit chip... holding an amazing 4x16bits=64bits of data total. Just goes to show it's hard to be sure where your unspoken assumptions may lie.... :-)

pwg 9y ago
What one thought also depends quite heavily upon whether one was involved in the field in some way during the 74xx series heyday. For those of us that were, seeing "64-bit" and "TTL" together immediately told us it was a chip that stored 64 bits worth of data.
- NikolaNovak 9y ago
  I thought as much :)
- jfoutz 9y ago
  One of the classes late in my undergrad program was computer engineering for comp-sci. Took us through basic combinatoric circuits, mux/demux, 7 segment display decoding, all that classic ttl stuff. final project was a 4 bit computer with 64 bits of ram. I remember spending many hours in the lab debugging my wiring. But it was super cool to toggle in data, advance the pc, toggle in an op, advance the pc and toggle in more data. i think i demonstrated 4 + 5 - 7 * 2 fun class.
gumby 9y ago
> Just goes to show it's hard to be sure where your unspoken assumptions may lie.... :-) Three years ago I posted a link on HN about TTL (Lransister-Lransister Logic) being 50 years old, entitled "50 years of TTL". Similarly, many people unsurprisingly expected it to be a story about a weird Time To Live field.
- taneq 9y ago
  Just goes to show how hugely context-dependent that desperately-overloaded TLA namespace is, and how important it is to actually define your acronyms the first time you use them, no matter how obvious you think it is that TLA means three-letter acronym...
  - dec0dedab0de 9y ago
    for instance, I hear TLA, and think Theatre of Living Arts
loa_in_ 9y ago
And then 4-bit WORDS? These are nibbles.

pwg 9y ago

What one thought also depends quite heavily upon whether one was involved in the field in some way during the 74xx series heyday. For those of us that were, seeing "64-bit" and "TTL" together immediately told us it was a chip that stored 64 bits worth of data.

NikolaNovak 9y ago
I thought as much :)
jfoutz 9y ago
One of the classes late in my undergrad program was computer engineering for comp-sci. Took us through basic combinatoric circuits, mux/demux, 7 segment display decoding, all that classic ttl stuff. final project was a 4 bit computer with 64 bits of ram. I remember spending many hours in the lab debugging my wiring. But it was super cool to toggle in data, advance the pc, toggle in an op, advance the pc and toggle in more data. i think i demonstrated 4 + 5 - 7 * 2 fun class.

gumby 9y ago

> Just goes to show it's hard to be sure where your unspoken assumptions may lie.... :-) Three years ago I posted a link on HN about TTL (Lransister-Lransister Logic) being 50 years old, entitled "50 years of TTL". Similarly, many people unsurprisingly expected it to be a story about a weird Time To Live field.

taneq 9y ago
Just goes to show how hugely context-dependent that desperately-overloaded TLA namespace is, and how important it is to actually define your acronyms the first time you use them, no matter how obvious you think it is that TLA means three-letter acronym...
- dec0dedab0de 9y ago
  for instance, I hear TLA, and think Theatre of Living Arts

loa_in_ 9y ago

And then 4-bit WORDS? These are nibbles.