3 Jan
2006
3 Jan
'06
11:53 a.m.
On 1/3/2006 at 2:09 PM Roy J. Tellason wrote:
More of a microcontroller? Yeah, maybe. I have some
of those I haven't
played with much either, 80xx parts mostly, some with rom but that's
easy
enough to disable and use an external eprom if you don't mind losing a
bunch
of pins. I just haven't gotten around to them yet. But ever scrapped
keyboard has one of those in there. :-)
The strange thing about history is that it's unpredictable.
I'dve expected to see the 6502 architecture (with its 8 bit limitations)
find its way into embedded microcontrollers and the 6800 (which feels a bit
more friendly to z80 residents with its 16-bit index register and stack) to
be at home in PCs. Yet, the reverse has turned out to be true--the 68HC11
seems to be everywhere--and the 6502 has been pretty much relegated to
obscurity after some popularity in the first generation of personal
computers. One wonders what the Apple ][ would have become had the 6800
been the processor of choice (IIRC, the Apple I had jumpers to allow either
the 6502 or 6800 to be used).
Which leads me, in a way, to the conclusion that maybe instruction sets
don't matter all that much in the real world.
Cheers,
Chuck