28 Apr
2004
28 Apr
'04
6:08 a.m.
Rumor has it that ben franchuk may have mentioned these words:
Dave Dunfield wrote:
>It's disappointing that the 6809 never received as much acceptance or use
>as it should
>have. It was truly in a class by itself. Motorola documents show two
>circles, one
>containing the words "8-bit" and one containing the words
"16-bit". A
>third circle,
>linking the other two contains the word "M6809", and this is a good
>description of the
>part. It was an 8-bit CPU with a great deal of 16 bit capability.
I have a couple as well, and I thought it was quite descriptive of the
processor's capabilities. I wonder what kind of neat logo we could come up
with for the Hitachi 63C09... ;-)
In hindsight, the 6809 while the best 8 processer it
only has 64k of
memory space.
So? Most (all?) 8-bit CPUs have that "limitation" -> which can be easily
overcome with bankswitching and other techniques...
Time has proved the 64k data and 64k program space
and
about 1 meg of memory ( something the PC-XT had or PDP11/unix ) was needed
for useful programs with a resonable OS.
1) My CoCo3 has that -- except the program space was limited to about 40K,
due to OS hooks... 512K Memory (rather easily upgraded to 2M, altho one guy
stuffed 64Meg in his -- yes, it's possible!) and with 512K and OS-9, was
(and is) infinitely more useful than *any* 386 I've seen, no matter how
much storage it's stuffed with. My first 386 was a glorified Nintendo, my
CoCo was still my main work machine.
2) Show me a "reasonable OS" for anything Intel based. Then show me the
ones that existed back in '86 or before. Then show me the ones that will
run on anything <'386. Then see if any are left that cost <$150. The list
gets *real* small, *real* quick. OS-9 is a reasonable OS, was first written
in '76, didn't need thousands of patches to support reasonable hardware (4G
Hard Drive support in the OS, back in '82. Show me that on an Intel box...)
Also since the only
common 6809 system was by Radio Shack as games machine you never got the
good I/O like lower case letters and a real serial and floppy drives.
Ben.
Game machine? Hardly... the Commodore & Atari were *much* better with games
than the CoCo ever was. Floppy drives? RS drives were the best available
for that class of market at the time.
Machine Interface Storage
Commodore 19200bps ser. 120K? thereabouts, please correct me.
Atari 19200bps ser. 88K (single) 120K (enhanced)
CoCo 250000bps par. 156K (standard)
720K (OS-9, stock controller)
Heck, the CoCo tape unit is almost as fast as the Commie disk drive, and
could be tweaked to go faster! Also, Later CoCo2s & all CoCo3s had
lowercase builtin... and RS had a cartridge that would give you a full
80x25 mono screen w/lower case (and full decenders, too!) if you needed to
"get down to business"... and my CoCo3's max screen was 106x28 chars...
great for spreadsheets!
How does [[ Crappy graphics, crappy sound, great I/O speeds & Unix-class
multitasking OSs ]] == "Game Machine"???
Hmmm... it seems that your recollection of history & mine are a wee bit
different...
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger | "Profile, don't speculate."
sysadmin, Iceberg Computers | Daniel J. Bernstein
zmerch(a)30below.com |