[ale] [OT] nostalgia - Happy 30th birthday IBM PC

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, Oct 04, 2011 at 02:42:35PM -0400, alan at alanlee.org wrote:
> On October 4, 2011 at 12:31 PM Ron Frazier
> <atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:
>
>> CPU Speed - PC - 4.7 MHz - LT - 2181 MHz dual core - LT is 928 X FASTER
>
> Actually in raw clock rate it's only 928 x faster.  8088s have no
> cache and take 30+ cycles for an 8 bit multiply.  With single clock
> ALU logic, caching, pipe-lining, super-scaling, branch prediction,
> hyper threading, high speed bus interconnects, etc, etc.. The real
> number is somewhere in the mid to high hundred thousands of times
> faster range.

Indeed.  Modern CPU designs are far more efficient than older ones
were.  I suspect that if an 8088 CPU were designed and made with
today's technological standards, even if it were only 4.77 MHz it
would be far better than the original ones were.  Simply making every
8088 instruction execute in a single clock would provide a dramatic
speed increase.  I suspect that if you were to do that and add a 128K
cache to the thing, you'd find that it'd be worlds better than the
"real thing".

> Some of us are actually designing new-old peripherals for the
> venerable old girls.  The first prototype third revision (yes third
> rev) of the XT-IDE boards will be hitting my door step in a couple
> weeks.  And there is a 32MB XMS/EMS/Conv RAM + 4MB ROM + RTC board
> ready to go to first spin next week.  And an open hardware 8/16 bit
> ISA VGA card in the works with 1080p HDMI up-scaling and USB HID K/M
> support in the design stage.  A bit sad how some of us spend our
> spare time really.

Nah!  It is interesting, I think.  And hey, anything that's fun and
funded is a good use of time, methinks.

>> RAM - PC - 64 KB (that's KILO, not Mega, not Giga) - LT - 8 GB (OK
>> so I upgraded the memory.)
>> If I'm doing the math right, 64 KB is .000061 GB, so LT has 131,148
>> X MORE MEMORY
>
>    64K was HUGE compared to my first computers!

Not mine.  :)  But then again, I'm a young'un.  My first computer was
a Cordata CS40 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordata_CS40 ) though I
never got the hardcard expansion for it.  I eventually did upgrade it
with an MFM (or was it RLL?) hard disk drive that held 20 MB of data.
Back then, I couldn't imagine using 20 MB of disk space.

Nowadays, anything less than ~100 GB of local storage can get to be a
bit tight for me.

And the funny thing is that I remember exactly how long it took to
read and write things from the floppies and the hard disks then... and
yet somehow I am still impatient with my computers because I'm spoiled
and I expect things to happen right friggin' now...

    --- Mike