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Was watching someone getting a Altair to run basic via a teletype and a paper tape. The amount of bit flipping just to get the initial bootloader ready made me appreciate the work Woz and like did to make later systems boot straight to a prompt on a CRT.

On a different note, those old systems had a RAM and CPU clock that was basically synced. Thus my understanding is that one could "cycle count" ones way to high performance code.

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The CPU was faster than the memory by the mid to late 70s (though they did start roughly equal at the start of the decade). You would insert a number of "wait states" with an external counter to ensure your memories' timing was not violated.

At that time RAM was asynchronous, you put an address in the A bus and by the specified delay time you would have your result on the output. Later on memories were pipelined and that is when they got their clock.

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