4 ms·

128 bytes. I'm trying to think of something in today's world with that little memory - a 'door opening' smart card? a car key? There are light bulbs with litera

128 bytes. I'm trying to think of something in today's world with that little memory - a 'door opening' smart card? a car key? There are light bulbs with literally a thousand times as much.

mrguyorama 4y ago
I 2007 or so, my mother bought me a "robot" kit with a Parallax branded "BASIC stamp microcontroller" https://www.parallax.com/product/basic-stamp-2-microcontroller-module/ https://www.parallax.com/product/basic-stamp-2-microcontroll... It had 32 bytes of RAM. The IDE and educational materials were very heavy handed about encouraging you to split them up into very small variables, only as big as needed. Think of all the 8 bit ints that fit into 32 bytes! PBASIC was actually pretty cool.
rsync 4y ago
128 bytes and no framebuffer. They had to "race the beam" ... but the VCS was not as fast as the beam, which is why Atari 2600 games always have a horizontally stretched look to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam "The book's title comes from the fact that the Atari 2600, initially branded the VCS (Video Computer System), did not have a video frame buffer, and required the programmers to write each line of video to the television, one line at a time. As there were only a limited number of machine cycles in which to do this, the programmers were literally racing a high speed electron beam across the screen."
dylan604 4y ago
DVDs. There were 16 GPRMs that were 16 bits. Doing anything that resembled complicated required the use of everyone of those bits. This was the first time I had ever had to use bits in this manner, and did things not dissimilar to how Pitfall is described using the bits it had available. Of course, I was doing things 20+ years later. I found it quite a bit of perverse fun thinking in 0s and 1s like that. Not all DVD authoring programs were made the same, and the abstraction layer software like DVD Studio Pro required use of half of those GPRMs limiting what the programmer could do.
midoridensha 4y ago
I have a "light bulb" (actually an LED light fixture that attaches to a standard ceiling socket) that runs some kind of OS and has WiFi connectivity.
josephcsible 4y ago
There are some AVR microcontrollers still manufactured today like that. For example, the ATtiny261A has 128 bytes of RAM, the ATtiny5 only has 32 bytes of RAM, and the ATtiny28 has no RAM at all (just registers).

128 bytes. I'm trying to think of something in today's world with that little memory - a 'door opening' smart card? a car key? There are light bulbs with literally a thousand times as much.

mrguyorama 4y ago

I 2007 or so, my mother bought me a "robot" kit with a Parallax branded "BASIC stamp microcontroller" https://www.parallax.com/product/basic-stamp-2-microcontroller-module/ https://www.parallax.com/product/basic-stamp-2-microcontroll... It had 32 bytes of RAM. The IDE and educational materials were very heavy handed about encouraging you to split them up into very small variables, only as big as needed. Think of all the 8 bit ints that fit into 32 bytes! PBASIC was actually pretty cool.

rsync 4y ago

128 bytes and no framebuffer. They had to "race the beam" ... but the VCS was not as fast as the beam, which is why Atari 2600 games always have a horizontally stretched look to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam "The book's title comes from the fact that the Atari 2600, initially branded the VCS (Video Computer System), did not have a video frame buffer, and required the programmers to write each line of video to the television, one line at a time. As there were only a limited number of machine cycles in which to do this, the programmers were literally racing a high speed electron beam across the screen."

dylan604 4y ago

DVDs. There were 16 GPRMs that were 16 bits. Doing anything that resembled complicated required the use of everyone of those bits. This was the first time I had ever had to use bits in this manner, and did things not dissimilar to how Pitfall is described using the bits it had available. Of course, I was doing things 20+ years later. I found it quite a bit of perverse fun thinking in 0s and 1s like that. Not all DVD authoring programs were made the same, and the abstraction layer software like DVD Studio Pro required use of half of those GPRMs limiting what the programmer could do.

midoridensha 4y ago

I have a "light bulb" (actually an LED light fixture that attaches to a standard ceiling socket) that runs some kind of OS and has WiFi connectivity.

josephcsible 4y ago

There are some AVR microcontrollers still manufactured today like that. For example, the ATtiny261A has 128 bytes of RAM, the ATtiny5 only has 32 bytes of RAM, and the ATtiny28 has no RAM at all (just registers).