4 ms·

Modern hardware is too complex to understand and bootstrap for a single person even more so as a hobby project. These known unknowns can be a powerful motivatio

by crest 2y ago

Modern hardware is too complex to understand and bootstrap for a single person even more so as a hobby project. These known unknowns can be a powerful motivation for someone who (partially) understands modern hardware to tinker with understandable systems. Some go down the retro route while others use medium to largish microcontrollers.

j-wang 2y ago
I miss the entire Maker Movement moment. It isn’t actually super complex to make a simple circuit board that does some basic things for you. It’s cheaper to just outsource making the board, but I even made my own simple boards (etched using hobbyist CNC machines). I even used a bunch of surface mount parts with them.
jsyjr 2y ago
I started my career as a programmer in 1972, writing real-time systems in assembly language on DEC PDP-8s and PDP-11s. Back then all software was written in assembly and distributed as machine readable source. (This being DEC, not IBM, that meant paper tape, not punched cards nor magnetic tape :-) Pre-microcode and mostly pre-CISC instruction sets were readily mastered. The constraints of storage, distribution media, lack of any high-level system programming languages, the small number of programmers, etc... meant that there just never was not that much system code for any given architecture. Similarly, I/O devices were exteremely simple and limited in number. MMU hardware was still a rarity. All this meant that any reasonable system programmer mastered a machine entirely, its instruction set, all its I/O and all of its (system) software. At the end of 1977 DEC shipped its VAX-11/780 and VMS V1. Less than a year later, I join DEC's compiler group to write VAX Pascal V2. I can only compare moving to VAX/VMS to being kicked out of the garden of Eden. Quickly I realized that never again would I enjoy that sense of mastery that I had felt on earlier machines :-(

by crest 2y ago

j-wang 2y ago

I miss the entire Maker Movement moment. It isn’t actually super complex to make a simple circuit board that does some basic things for you. It’s cheaper to just outsource making the board, but I even made my own simple boards (etched using hobbyist CNC machines). I even used a bunch of surface mount parts with them.

jsyjr 2y ago

I started my career as a programmer in 1972, writing real-time systems in assembly language on DEC PDP-8s and PDP-11s. Back then all software was written in assembly and distributed as machine readable source. (This being DEC, not IBM, that meant paper tape, not punched cards nor magnetic tape :-) Pre-microcode and mostly pre-CISC instruction sets were readily mastered. The constraints of storage, distribution media, lack of any high-level system programming languages, the small number of programmers, etc... meant that there just never was not that much system code for any given architecture. Similarly, I/O devices were exteremely simple and limited in number. MMU hardware was still a rarity. All this meant that any reasonable system programmer mastered a machine entirely, its instruction set, all its I/O and all of its (system) software. At the end of 1977 DEC shipped its VAX-11/780 and VMS V1. Less than a year later, I join DEC's compiler group to write VAX Pascal V2. I can only compare moving to VAX/VMS to being kicked out of the garden of Eden. Quickly I realized that never again would I enjoy that sense of mastery that I had felt on earlier machines :-(