4 ms·

This is the computing I fell in love with back in the 80s/90s, when I could realistically understand most, if not all about a given computer (that applies mostl

This is the computing I fell in love with back in the 80s/90s, when I could realistically understand most, if not all about a given computer (that applies mostly to 80s computers). Nothing wrong with the stuff we do today, but I think some of the "magic" of fully mastering a computer and seeing all those raw commands executing at lightning speed (relatively speaking!) was lost.

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Its not lost, Its now microcontroller/arduino programming. Its a lot of fun to write code for something so direct to the hardware. There is no OS, no security, no multi tasking. You just write a bit to a certain memory address linked to a pin and motor go brrr.
- WWLink 6y ago
  Sometimes I think the higher end embedded chips are even more fun, because you have an FPGA with shared memory to the processor and tons of IO pins. You can do some truly ridiculous things, including emulating other processors in the fpga fabric hehe.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    I haven't tried FPGAs yet, just doing basic AVR programming with GCC-AVR and avrdude. Do FPGAs have an open source/hobby community around them like AVR does? I have heard bad things about FPGA companies being old fashioned/secretive.
    - opencl 6y ago
      It's true that the FPGA vendors are very secretive, often to the point of requiring NDAs for access to datasheets and toolchains. There is open source tooling for some FPGAs and a fairly small but very helpful community around it. Yosys, IceStorm, SymbiFlow, and nmigen are the major projects in the space that I'm aware of.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> Nothing wrong with the stuff we do today, ... Nothing? There are quite a lot of things if you ask me. As much as things are more complicated out of necessity they are also more complicated for completely unnecessary reasons too.

4 ms·

This is the computing I fell in love with back in the 80s/90s, when I could realistically understand most, if not all about a given computer (that applies mostl

by danielrpa 6y ago

Polylactic_acid 6y ago
Its not lost, Its now microcontroller/arduino programming. Its a lot of fun to write code for something so direct to the hardware. There is no OS, no security, no multi tasking. You just write a bit to a certain memory address linked to a pin and motor go brrr.
- WWLink 6y ago
  Sometimes I think the higher end embedded chips are even more fun, because you have an FPGA with shared memory to the processor and tons of IO pins. You can do some truly ridiculous things, including emulating other processors in the fpga fabric hehe.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    I haven't tried FPGAs yet, just doing basic AVR programming with GCC-AVR and avrdude. Do FPGAs have an open source/hobby community around them like AVR does? I have heard bad things about FPGA companies being old fashioned/secretive.
    - opencl 6y ago
      It's true that the FPGA vendors are very secretive, often to the point of requiring NDAs for access to datasheets and toolchains. There is open source tooling for some FPGAs and a fairly small but very helpful community around it. Yosys, IceStorm, SymbiFlow, and nmigen are the major projects in the space that I'm aware of.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> Nothing wrong with the stuff we do today, ... Nothing? There are quite a lot of things if you ask me. As much as things are more complicated out of necessity they are also more complicated for completely unnecessary reasons too.