Hacker News Reader

Comment by AceJohnny2 | Hacker News Reader

TBH I'm still flabbergasted that modern SoCs will "just put a CPU there" rather than a DMA, because we can actually afford it. 6502 cores are sprinkled around like fairy dust.

View on HN

I remember someone who was acutely familiar with the design of my first computer (the Ohio Scientific Superboard II, an awesome 1970s 6502 machine! http://oldcomputers.net/osi-600.html ) saying that he spotted the same hardware being used, in its entirety, as a printer buffer a few years later. (A printer buffer was basically a device used to cache the output of a computer to a slow printer so the original machine didn't have wait for the printer to finish. A glorified cable, in other words.)

I'm very sad to live in a world where "printer buffer" has to be explained to the "tech" community.

Well, I was pre-emptively explaining it, because I realised in mid-anecdote that printers don't need that kind of thing these days. Maybe you are right, and it is obvious to someone skilled in the arts, as the patent applications say!

They do need them, it's just that the buffer is built in to the printer now because memory and integration are so cheap.

The giant Kyocera printer at work has a little screen where it shows you it not only loading up the print buffer, but purging the information from the disk afterward so there is no trace of PII remaining.

They have them, because, as you said, it's so cheap. But I think dannyobrien is correct; they probably don't need them, because modern OSes have print queues and the computer is no longer useless while printing.

It’s nice to be able to run off a long document, pack up your laptop, and pick up the document on your way out the door to the (courtroom|client|boardroom|exam hall|___etc___).

Even if the printer is dumb and doesn’t interpret a page description language such as PostScript, I don’t think it’s feasible to get the timing right to drive modern printing hardware when the buffer is on some random other piece of hardware whose OS you don’t even control, even if the connection is by cable.

The main reason why we have network is not for pc to pc communication but sharing printer and hard disk. Communication comes later. Do not underestimate the productivity gain of printer buffer.

Those were the days my friend.

I cut my computing teeth on a sibling of that machine, an Ohio Scientific C2-8P that my brother and I bought in 1979. I was 12, and reverse engineering the games that came on the cassette tapes with the machine are how I got started in software. The arduino uno (atmel/microchip AT328p) is a much more powerful computer lol.

Its been always like that.

1982 Victor 9000 / Sirius 1 designed by Chuck Peddle of Commodore/MOS 6502 fame had floppy capacity extended from standard IBM PC 180KB all the way up to 600KB per side. 1.2MB floppy in 1982 using same magnetic medium! How? Software controlled drive with 6502 doing GCR combined with Zoned Constant Linear Velocity and Zone bit recording. There were still hard drives being manufactured not using ZBR 8 years later (Seagate ST-157A)!

It also did 25x80 text using 10x16 font or 800x400 bitmap graphics at 76Hz. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Systems_Technology http://oldcomputers.net/victor9000.html

There was also an IBM PC 8088 clone in ~1984 with "dedicated Video DMA" implemented by Intel MCS-48 microcontroller (8042/8048, same chip as keyboard controllers at the time), sadly I cant remember the name and google fails me :( I do remember nobody used it for anything and the only coding example I could find at the time was a singular YT video where someone reverse engineered manufacturer demo and reused it for its own sprite engine.

The FPGA dev boards I worked with in a college course circa 2009 had a couple of PowerPC cores thrown in as a bonus, with a whole system for being able to interface between CPU and FPGA: https://www.xilinx.com/content/dam/xilinx/support/documents/...

It's still common today. The de-10 nano of mister fame leverages the hard processor to great affect.

Most FPGA projects need a processor anyway, usually adding a soft core, but a hard core is superior in area and performance -- though you cannot choose the type of core anymore, obviously. I'd argue this is a different scenario because they didn't "sprinkle cores" because they had the area but actually reduced the area needed.

Really???? 6502s are still used (albeit as components)? People still do 6502 programming? If true I'm bloody gobsmacked.

Yes you can also still buy new 6502 and 6522 etc from WDC via digikey etc.

For a lot of things a 6502 or other 8bit cores are more than enough. Don't need to put a giant ARM or RISC-V into everything to drive a simple display.

I'm just surprised to hear people use a 6502 rather than a Picoblaze or 8051 or something.

Those old cores are wildly efficient if you're just twiddling bits and shuffling data. And on modern processes you can run them at GHz clock speeds.

For the core alone, sure, but don't you have to run them off static ram or something (that is, not slow DRAM) to get anywhere near those speeds in practice?

Yeah but code size is tiny, might be as small as a few hundred bytes.

While it does exist, I think the answer is not really. Yes sometimes you don't need more than 8-bit but existing solutions from other vendors beat it with integrated RAM+Flash+IO etc

In college (more than a decade ago for me, but still in this millennium) our MOS 6502 hardware/assembly programming lab was called "Microcontroller Design". This was as opposed to the later lab class "Microcomputer Design" which used the more recent Motorola 68k. I suppose the chip that powered the original Macintoshes is slightly closer to today's idea of a microcomputer than the 6502 and its original "microcomputer revolution" Apple II/TI Home Computer/Commodore 64. One of the takeaways from those courses was that the "microcomputer" has moved on so much from what you can breadboard in a lab (the Motorola 68k was one of the last "microcomputer" chipsets that you could breadboard and even that was still a hardware reliability challenge), but MOS 6502 was cemented as a "forever" tool as a "microcontroller". You can still get ICs in bread board forms and build it next to classic TTL logic chips and test/prototype it at human scale clock cycles (things you can see/read in an oscilloscope in real time). You can merge into an SoC core and run it at modern processor clock cycles. There are so many wild uses for the MOS 6502 as a "microcontroller" on the periphery of computing. Between MOS' bankruptcy and the many licensees of the 6502 and the many people that cut their programming teeth in the "microcomputer revolution" of the Apple II et al, the 65xx family likely really is a vestigial "forever chip".

As a programmer, and I've heard this sentiment from others too, I also think the 6502 was also the last "fun" assembly language to write directly without a higher level language, which adds to its legacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com