SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing

That's what I was mentioning in my earlier post. The Z80 and 6502, which are of about the same vintage and technology, though entirely different architecture, were designed with an eye to control applications, which were the bread-and-butter of their intended tasks, unlike the 6809, which was designed to be used for those "larger" applications, that would benefit from the more orthogonal instruction set and from the features that make generation of large programs more likely to hit their market window. From the standpoint of their respective "power" in computing applications, the 6809 is, in every way, a more likely preferred choice among computer scientists, though it probably won't outperform either of the other two in a race to get a specific task done, simply because the earlier two, particularly the 6502, could exercise the memory at a much higher rate, assuming that you had the memory bandwidth available. What was the fastest 6809 that you ever got to run back in the early '80's? Synertek was shipping a 6502 guaranteed to operate at 4 MHz bus cycle. That required <200 ns SRAMs. To operate a similarly fast bus, ("E" clock) the 6809 would have had to run from a 16 MHz clock, unless memory fails me. The 6809 was MOT's acknowledgment that microprocessor applications had wandered into a computing-intensive realm that needed an elegant architecture. They just weren't willing to impinge on the domain of their already-under-development 68K series in order to put their "elegant" 8-bitter out there. Their offering the 6809 also suggests that an elegant-from-the-inside processor could surpass the 16-bit offering from Intel because it could be programmed quite easily in assembler, where the irregularities of the earlier architectures made programming in the large favor the use of high-level languages that tend to be relatively inefficient on small machines. Even today's compilers demand several hundred Kbytes for a simple "hello-world" program on one of today's machines, while it took well fewer than 256 bytes of executable code to print a short text string on a Z-80 or 6502. Dick ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tony Duell" &lt;ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk&gt; To: &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt; Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2001 12:23 PM Subject: Re: SemiOT: Mourning for Classic Computing