Reproduction micros

[Liam Proven]

On 17 July 2016 at 20:54, Peter Corlett <abuse at cabal.org.uk> wrote:
> I think it should be quite obvious from the prices why the Amiga 2000 didn't ship with a 68020 as standard.

Exactly so.

This is part of the brilliance of the Archimedes, AIUI. In detailed
technical ways I confess I do not fully understand, the ARM2 and its
chipset's design was optimised to work with cheap DRAM with relatively
slow cycle times. The OS also ran directly from ROM.

Even PCs at the time copied their BIOS ROM to RAM for faster
execution. Acorn designed around this.

Similarly, one of the pleasant features of the Psion 3 & 5 series PDAs
was that their OS ran from ROM. Thus, although the OSes were very
stable & seldom needed reboots, when they did, it was reasonably quick
and the machines were highly functional with, even in the late models,
as little as 8-16MB of RAM, running a rich pre-emptive multitasking
GUI OS.

Compare with, e.g., Android or iOS, where the OS is stored in ROM but
can't execute from it. Thus, slow boot times as the entire thing must
be *copied* to RAM at IPL. And of course as these run
not-very-cut-down 1960s/1970s minicomputer multiuser OSes, the OSes
themselves occupy many hundreds of meg, these days edging to gigabyte
range.


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