27 Jan
1999
27 Jan
'99
2:20 a.m.
On Wed, 27 Jan 1999, John Foust wrote:
At 10:21 PM 1/26/99 -0800, Sam Ismail wrote:
Yes - and No 8-)
To demonstrate that old
hardware that can be picked up for pennies can be combined to attain
amazing amounts of computing power.
Amazing? How many orders of magnitude difference in horsepower
between a C-64 and a $600 Best Buy Intel box? Perhaps I'm being
unromantic, and I certainly have too many old computers of the
XT/AT/486 variety, but I just don't "get" many of these distributed
computing projects. (I do leave my spare contemporary computers
working for the RC5 project at distributed.net, but that's another
story.) Take 10 computers at 1 horse each, and they're
still not equal to one
contemporary (cheap) computer at 10 horses. Sure, there's hack value
in doing it, but mostly for people with too much time on their hands,
or for people who aren't paying for the electric bill or the room to
put them in. Hack away, sure - but claim they're doing "useful" work?
Well - I wrote a 6502 emulator/simulator that puts the hardware I/O on
seperate machines. It was all written in Perl. Each 6532 (it was a
KIM-1 8-) ran on a diferent machine. When the address of the 6532 got hit
- it talked TCP/IP to the selected machine (talk about address translation
8-) and received back the ROM if it was in the ROM area or performed IO if
it was in the digital IO section. Now you can ask the BIG question of
Why?
It lets me re-write the individual pieces of IO code and replace hardware
at 'anytime'. Handy if you are 'hacking' and it taught me a lot. I
could
change the 'hardware' on the fly and even replace the 6532's with any
other IC I chose. Plus - the code is expandable to include just about
any CPU and any architecture.
No - it is not a speed demon 8-) It does run asynchronously but then so
do most processors. But I can see things change on the fly at each
machine and follow all the registers in all the hardware at about the same
time. I can single step and even micro-step the emulator.
BC