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Thoughts on the Memory Efficiency of iCab and Programming in the 80s (1999)
- userbinator 12y agoI'm surprised at the lack of any mention of the demoscene in an article about extreme software efficiency. But there is a general observation that whenever there is an abundance of a resource, people will tend to act like it's effectively infinite. This has been true of the forestry industry, gas and oil (remember when fuel efficiency was barely a concern for cars?), etc. Software is only one of the more recent systems to follow this trend. I've always found it ironic that multitasking didn't bring more prominence to the issue, since every application is then in direct competition with every other application running on the system, and if they all act like they can use all the memory and CPU, none of them will get what they want.
- vardump 12y ago"JIT" techniques were pretty common. Well, first write code to memory and then run it. Often used for drawing lines etc. Simplest implementations just modified code in memory, more complicated actually built the function byte by byte.
- vardump 12y agoFrom the article: > The only way to get an 8-bit 1.44Mhz machine with 64K of memory It was below 1 MHz, I remember there were 63 microseconds per horizontal line (PAL). So the clock frequency must have been a bit below 1 MHz, maybe 0.98 MHz or so.
- Narishma 12y agoThe PAL version was slightly below (0.985 Mhz) and the NTSC version slightly above (1.023 Mhz).