5 ms·
Every keyboard has an MCU. They used to be 8051s, but now ARM (or PIC or AVR) is more likely.
by MrMorden 8y ago
Every keyboard has an MCU. They used to be 8051s, but now ARM (or PIC or AVR) is more likely.
- ggm 8y agoEach time I do the OSX "need to reboot" thing and it sits at the equivalent of BIOS blowing driver updates for things like this, I think "yea, i hate BIOS, but at least I get told which devices are being re-coded" -with OSX, its a bit more opaque. "trust us"
- TrainsParent 8y agoecho "Now we're going to upgrade your storage capacity, please wait." rm -rf / Don't trust the status messages; they could be manipulated to anything, in practice. Counter-practice; I mean.
- vidarh 8y agoI loved pointing out to people that my Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 both had a 6502 compatible CPU as the keyboard controller (it had an onboard PROM and tiny amount of RAM, so there wasn't much you could do with it, but it was awesome at the time to upgrade from a 6502 compatible machine to one that had a similarly powerful CPU in the keyboard. But of course the C64 floppy drive (the 1541) had an actual 6502 in it, and enough memory and ability for you to download programs over the serial port... In other words, we've been in this world for a very long time - a lot of peripherals used to have fully fledged CPUs in them already in the 70's in some cases, and some of them were user-programmable. The reduction in this in the early PC era was an exception, not the norm.