if you like good antic and samples from Intel,AMD and others CPU makers, one of my buddies has a cool website, with pictures:

http://www.engineering-sample.com/

he is a great collector of CPU, I myself has a great collection of Intel's CPUs, including some very rare parts ... obviously, i passed on the other one ;)

my favorit one is the Pentium Pro 200Mhz, i like the "gold side" of it :)

I find the CPUs of the past beautiful, and I can't stop being amazed when I think of the integration we are having, year after year:
In 45nm, you could line up 150 transistors in the diameter of a red cell(7µm) !
amazing!

who?

Thanks for the link who? Some interesting processors at that site. The Zilog 4004 was pretty cool. A processor with 16 pins! Brings me back to my early days of Motorola 6502 and Zilog Z-80 8-bit processors. There wasn't a processor speed war back then as everybody's CPU was slower than a turtle. The battle was for functionality and storage. Processor speeds were around 1 to 5 MHz. The processor speed wars might have started when the "turbo mode" 8 MHz chips started showing up . . .

Motorola made the 6800, National Semiconductor made the 6502, I know I used a lot of computers with the 6502 in It and they said NS on them.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

Motorola made the 6800, National Semiconductor made the 6502, I know I used a lot of computers with the 6502 in It and they said NS on them.

I do believe it was MOS Technologies that made the 6502 chip, and was the same development team who quit Motorola en masse after creating the 68k series chip who worked for MOS Technologies.

National Semiconductor might have been a second-source for the chip, which would explain NS on them - similar to AMD being a second-source for Intel originally.

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Motorola made the 6800, National Semiconductor made the 6502, I know I used a lot of computers with the 6502 in It and they said NS on them.

I do believe it was MOS Technologies that made the 6502 chip, and was the same development team who quit Motorola en masse after creating the 68k series chip who worked for MOS Technologies.

National Semiconductor might have been a second-source for the chip, which would explain NS on them - similar to AMD being a second-source for Intel originally.

Could be, I only used the Atari 400 that the 6502 was in, Never did get to the end of Shamus.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

IIRC, the 6502 was the backbone of a lot of arcade games back then as well.

Alinator

IIRC, the 6502 was the backbone of a lot of arcade games back then as well.

Alinator

Yep and Atari sold a lot of them too(2600 comes to mind);). Although not always under their own brand name, Like Sears, etc. Of course there was Commodore and yep Apple of course when It came to computers.

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

Ah yes it's all coming back to me now! :-)

Although I was thinking about the ones you fed quarters to when I posted. ;-)

Alinator

Ah yes it's all coming back to me now! :-)

Although I was thinking about the ones you fed quarters to when I posted. ;-)

Alinator

Yeah Atari had that covered too. :D

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

Motorola made the 6800....

Don't forget the 68000 family from Motorola too. Arguably the best microprocessor architecture ever created (and itself shamelessly copied from the DEC PDP-11/VAX architecture).

....National Semiconductor made the 6502....

Actually it was MOS who came out with the 6502, it was invented by a chap named Chuck Peddle, who went on to design the Commodore PET and later the Victor 9000(?)/ACT Sirius (it was renamed the "Sirius" in the UK at least due to trademark issues).

Many other manufacturers produced 6502s under license, including Nat-Semi, Rockwell, Toshiba (they also made Z80s under licence BTW)....far too many to list - and far too late at night to try and remember, LOL!


TTFN - Pete.

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I do believe it was MOS Technologies that made the 6502 chip, and was the same development team who quit Motorola en masse after creating the 68k series chip who worked for MOS Technologies.

Errrm, do you mean the 6800 rather than the 68K (68000)? The 6502 predates the 68K family by some 5 or 6 years....at least...?

I recall hearing a similar story, many years ago, about the design team at Intel quitting en-masse when their managers rejected their idea for a "Super 8080" in favour of what eventually became the 8085. Said design team set up on their own and the Z80 was born....what a chip THAT was for it's day!


TTFN - Pete.

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Motorola made the 6800....

Don't forget the 68000 family from Motorola too. Arguably the best microprocessor architecture ever created (and itself shamelessly copied from the DEC PDP-11/VAX architecture).

....National Semiconductor made the 6502....

Actually it was MOS who came out with the 6502, it was invented by a chap named Chuck Peddle, who went on to design the Commodore PET and later the Victor 9000(?)/ACT Sirius (it was renamed the "Sirius" in the UK at least due to trademark issues).

Many other manufacturers produced 6502s under license, including Nat-Semi, Rockwell, Toshiba (they also made Z80s under licence BTW)....far too many to list - and far too late at night to try and remember, LOL!


TTFN - Pete.

Like I said I only used the 6502, I also later used the 68000, 68020, 68030 and yep the 68040, I'd have loved to have used the 68060 cpu, But that was not to be. The chips I used never got to 100MHz of course, Too bad, Apple was the only one to have even half a chance against the clones back then, Commodore would have made It If they hadn't messed up, Atari had the Tramiels and they screwed the place into the ground and made nearly unexpandable computers, Atari then tried changing their computers but It was too little, too late. At the end they had some advanced computers, what a waste, The PC won in the end and Apple is still around. Oh Atari and Commodore are starting to rise like twin Phoenixes from the grave, I wonder will they make the comeback or sink for good this time?

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Savoir-Faire is everywhere!
The T1 Trust, T1 Class 4-4-4-4 #5550, America's First HST

Motorola made the 6800, National Semiconductor made the 6502, I know I used a lot of computers with the 6502 in It and they said NS on them.

I do believe it was MOS Technologies that made the 6502 chip, and was the same development team who quit Motorola en masse after creating the 68k series chip who worked for MOS Technologies.

National Semiconductor might have been a second-source for the chip, which would explain NS on them - similar to AMD being a second-source for Intel originally.

The really interesting chip was the 6501.

There were only two instructions that were "swapped" in the 6502 and the 6800, so it was trivially easy to take 6800 code and make it run on the 6502.

... and the 6501 was pin-compatible with the 6800, so you could easily pull that $180 Motorola part and replace it with a $25 6501.

Motorola offered not to sue if MOS Technologies withdrew the 6501.

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I think it was the 8008 8bit chip that was used in street "stop and go" lights, and it was Microsoft, who were originally going to call themselves Traff-O-Data, who were going to write software for it and be in control of the world's automobile traffic software.

Glad *that* didn't happen, we'd have had to sign NDAs to see the green lights because they're only for developers, while they'd stop working every first Tuesday in the month...

Pity they didn't choose the name, then we could have nicknamed them to a far more appropriate Trash-O-Data...

The really interesting chip was the 6501.

There were only two instructions that were "swapped" in the 6502 and the 6800, so it was trivially easy to take 6800 code and make it run on the 6502.

There were a few more differences than that, in fact the architectures were quite different....

The 6800 has two 8-bit accumulators (which can be used as a single 16-bit accumulator {or did that come in with the 6802?}) and a 16-bit index register. The 6502 has a single 8-bit accumulator and two 8-bit index registers. Porting "real" code between the two architectures was not difficult, but was definitely non-trivial!

... and the 6501 was pin-compatible with the 6800, so you could easily pull that $180 Motorola part and replace it with a $25 6501.

KER-CHING!

*THAT* explains something I read in an electronics magazine back in the day about being able to drop a 6501 into a 6800 based system....I'd assumed it was a misprint as I couldn't find any data on the 6501. Then when I compared the pinouts of the 6502 and 6800 I got even more confused, 'cause they aren't pin-compatible. They obviously DID mean to print "6501". :-)

At least they were able/allowed to keep the 6502 compatible with 6800 family peripheral chips, which was a big plus at the time.


TTFN - Pete.

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my 1st Microprocessor was in a TI57 calculator! I could write 49 steps of ASM code ... I was amazed when i figured out a way to write "A" on the screen ...

Later on, I was 12, my father bought me a ZX81 from Sinclair, with a Z80 at .... 1 MHz! the cpu was running "basic" and was managing the video tram at the same time. moving the ASM code was scrambling the screen if not done properly! I got the 16K extension, and i was the king of the world!

I wrote little games for a french computer news paper and made my 1st dollars.
Then, at 14, I got a break throough! a Oric 1 computer! with 64KB!!! awesome, be the keyboard was sucky. It had color pixels!!!! a 6501 at an impressive 4.7Mhz! later , i bought the upgrade to the Oric Atmos, black slick box, with stylst red strip! Again, i thought I was the king of the world. at 15, I got an amstrad, because the news paper who way "enslaving me" wanted amstrad article. Then ... the 1st equinox in my programmer's life: My AMIGA 500. Just amazing ...
unfortunatly , the open source code news paper I was writing for died... snifff. So, i had to find a different way to pay for my next computers.
The solution: Write MSDOS software for people trying to manage their money ... You are now in 1986 ... Since then, I writed hundreds of ASM codes, video codecs, ray tracing ... demos, games on DOS, Win95(yessss!!), I even wrote part of one game using WinG (expert will appreciate)
In between, I got the incredible chance to serve in the french army as a computer expert in one of the most prestigious regiment, one of those that never surrended to the germans, keeping the fight in Africa while france was occupied. After this, I was lucky enough to work with Herve, Dominique, Andre, Momo,Olivier and Cordo (they will reconize themselve), they showed me a world of amazing creativity. Herve and Cordo were 2 pioneers of video game in France, they were in the 1st team of software developpers of Ubisoft.Ubi people, amazing!!! HEllo to the Mont Real team ... I know some cruncher there!
Since 1997, I am optimizing PC software, creating new instructions, and when i look back, i regret nothing, I had a lot of fun, and I think more is coming a head, the next 3 years are going to be amazing, i know that for sure!
I am waiting for the AI to show up! my software fellows! let's do it!
Our PCs are still unable to comprehend us! The actual search on your Pc does not even know how to deal with spelling mistake properly! (hehehe I need this!!)
The software world need to catch up, we need to get the AI capabilities into a great SDK. Some of Intel's PhD did put together the computer vision part already, then they made it open source. it is call OpenCV (Open Computer Vision) We need to get all of those libraries together and make them easy to use, every "combo box",Text field into windows should be able to spell check. There is software already in Open CV to classify movies, sorting them by actors ... start recording when somebody show up on one TV chanel, the application are so vaste. Fellows, if any of you wants to use those libs, and make the PC what it is suppose to be, feel free to use it! If you have ideas, do it! after all, computer science is the land of opportinity!
A.I , fuzzy logic, HMM networks, all of those can be used everywhere, you 'll be surprise.
I am finishing a little detail at work, then: Demo :)
what about you guys? how did you get here?
who?

what about you guys? how did you get here?

Well, Francois, I got run over by a car and bought a BBC Micro B and some Moog synthesisers with the compensation in 1980 while at college.
Within a year I made a DAC and some sequencing software to play the synths and keep a TR606 in sync, then I designed an ADC and had my first "Mary had a little lamb" experience writing 6502 asm. Things progressed and soon made it midi capable and turned it into a rather underpowered music studio, with 4 voice polyphony and 24K sample ram at 8bit quality and dreamt of getting a 68000...
Height of it was writing a windowed 256 point FFT in 6502asm, and took 2 hours to get through a 24k sample to disk. Then I could mess around with the harmonics and resynthesise new sounds from it.

Used this hobby work to get a postgrad diploma at City Uni in London and met wife, got married and went into consultancy in databases, graphics, design, printing and the internet in 1989 and ended up designing intranets for Cap Gemini for 4 years in 1998 while writing music and playing in bands.

Fate turned up and I fell in love with a Hungarian aupair, and ended up living here in vibrant Budapest.

Now spending most of my time buried in linux systems, php and mysql, programming and consulting around the world, keeping up with developments and spending too much time messing around with BOINC... :-)

I do believe it was MOS Technologies that made the 6502 chip, and was the same development team who quit Motorola en masse after creating the 68k series chip who worked for MOS Technologies.

Errrm, do you mean the 6800 rather than the 68K (68000)? The 6502 predates the 68K family by some 5 or 6 years....at least...?

Hehe, yes. I did mean the 6800, but my brain was engaged to 68k for some reason. D'oh!

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Glad *that* didn't happen, we'd have had to sign NDAs to see the green lights because they're only for developers, while they'd stop working every first Tuesday in the month...

Pity they didn't choose the name, then we could have nicknamed them to a far more appropriate Trash-O-Data...

I'm surprised you didn't go for the more obvious Trash-Ur-Data (Trash-Your-Data). ;-)

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I'm surprised you didn't go for the more obvious Trash-Ur-Data (Trash-Your-Data). ;-)

Perhaps too obvious, and a bit too many mods... Trash-O-Data sounds rather Douglas Adamsian for a machine dedicated to the job... :-) or perhaps Trash-O-Matic, Trash-U-Like? An ideal description of MS Backup (from experience!), and 6 million hapless users' Windows zombies, in the hands of ruthless criminals.
An aside, O (sic) (qv 'Ő') in Hungarian means him/her/it. It has no gender! :)

[quote]Golden rules for using Vista:

don't

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