Memory and the 68K (was Re: PocketPDP) - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

21 Sep 2000

--- John Honniball &lt;John.Honniball(a)uwe.ac.uk&gt; wrote:
...

 On Thu, 21 Sep 2000 08:24:43 -0700 (PDT) Ethan Dicks 
 &lt;ethan_dicks(a)yahoo.com&gt; wrote:
  If you did, it would _crawl_.  The CPU in the
Palm is an enhanced 68000
 processor running at a fairly low speed (16Mhz?  20Mhz?).  I think it would
 be cool, too, but intolerably slow.  
 Slow?  I've programmed an Atari ST with a 68000 at 8MHz, 
 and it only had 512kbytes of memory!   
And I've programmed many an Amiga similarly equipped.

I was thinking back to running the PDP-11 emulator on a SPARC1 - it was
substantially slower than the real thing, but barely tolerable.  The Palm
would have to be slower than that.

...
  According to the 
 O'Reilly book, on the Palm Pilot "Memory is Extremely 
 Limited".  Well, mine's got 2Mbytes, which isn't limited at 
 all compared to the Atari... 
Yes, but remember that the 2Mb is all of your storage _and_ running memory.
It's like running an Amiga with 2Mb total, no hard disk, no floppies, just
a RAM disk.  When I was using my Palm for an aviation GPS, I had 1.5M of
data files for a 38K program.

-ethan

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