5 ms·
IMHO older computers are more interesting because you can have much better relative understanding of what they consist of, how do they work and and much higher
by qwerty456127 5y ago
IMHO older computers are more interesting because you can have much better relative understanding of what they consist of, how do they work and and much higher relative degree of control over them. They induce senses senses of curiosity, flexibility and security this way.
Compared to the computers from the previous century which could be built, modified, repaired and operated consciously, modern ones are more of disposable magic-button black boxes which will turn into pumpkins as soon as the vendor servers turn off and go extinct like ancient magical creatures as soon as the factory in Taiwan shuts down because nobody has a serious idea about all their internals and how to produce them anymore.
Sadly, there already is a generation of programmers who aren't even interested in being able to assemble their own PC from a set of boards, let alone understanding anything about things like registers and the physics behind them.
UPDATE: yes, I would say the same about cars.
- canadianfella 5y ago> Sadly, there already is a generation of programmers who aren't even interested in being able to assemble their own PC from a set of boards Why is this sad? Is it sad when cab drivers buy new cars instead of kit cars?
- jhvkjhk 5y agoNo need to sad, with the rise of RISC-V and the help of FPGA, many CS students nowadays take writing a soft core CPU as a hobby. When RISC-V and open source FPGA toolchain become more popular, I guess more and more programmers will come back to play with hardware.
- birktj 5y agoI have been looking for a cheap fpga devboard for this sort of thing, but results have been somewhat disappointing. The tinyfpgas look great but have been sold out for a long time. I have seen some interesting ones on tindie but the selection is quite limited. Does anyone here have any good pointers? (Plus for one with a hand-solderable fpga)
- colejohnson66 5y agoThe iCE40 from Lattice is pretty popular for its open source (reverse engineered) toolchain. As far as hand soldering an FPGA, you’re gonna have a hard time finding any that aren’t BGA simply because of all the IO. They exist, but probably not in dev board form as they’re really limited in IO and cells.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nobodywasishere 5y agoI like and use the Upduino 3.0
- sigstoat 5y agothe iCE40HX4K is available in TQFP-144, which can be reliably hand soldered after some youtube videos and practice. i think there are still xilinx CPLDs in TQFP too. should be boards floating around for any of them. if not, well, only reason you'd want to hand solder it is because you're making your own board. a simple dev board is great practice to make sure you've got your package correct.
- mrweasel 5y agoI love watching retro computing channels on YouTube, and many of them does such a great job of explaining CPUs like 6502, 6510, Z80 or Motorola 68000. Especially the 6502 is interesting, not because it's a marvel of technology, but because you can learn how it work in a reasonable time frame. I took university courses in computer architecture, but I can explain how a modern PowerPC or AMD64 CPU work. The 6510 is something I can easily follow when some guy on YouTube explains how a C64 works and how he goes about debugging and repairing a broken system.
- coldpie 5y agoProbably my favorite example of this is this guy's demonstration of an Altair 8800, one of the earliest PCs, back when they had physical switches on the front panel which you would use to manually enter machine code for the computer to run. Scroll down to the bottom for the earliest videos to see the introductory demonstrations. He builds on that to show how data was loaded from paper punch tape, then later audio cassettes and external disk storage: https://www.youtube.com/user/deramp5113/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/deramp5113/videos
- ilaksh 5y agoThere is an online Altair simulator https://s2js.com/altair/ https://s2js.com/altair/
- Stratoscope 5y ago> I took university courses in computer architecture, but I can explain how a modern PowerPC or AMD64 CPU work. Just to avoid possible confusion, I think you meant "I can't explain", is that right?
- m463 5y agoI think it's all state-of-the-art vs grassroots-tech-tree Meaning - the state of the art stuff can't be explored by normal people, but over time the knowledge and tools trickle down and it becomes democratized. Older cars were accessible to shadetree mechanics, who could work on most stuff. When they became electronic, it cut some people off... until things like canbus became known, and later tools became generally available to folks with a laptop. Only twist nowadays is manufacturers are actively preventing some things through cryptographic signatures and the like. Hopefully, eventually, this will get tools to allow people to mess with things.