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Comment by donpdonp | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting project. It'd be nice to see video of it in action and what use cases the author had in mind. A pic in a different post shows the 48k ram chip, and not far away is an SD card of 1 gigabyte - that's a dramatic contrast. The storage can hold the contents of ram 21,845 times over. If an 8GB laptop today had the equivalent storage, it would be a disk of 174TB.

Browsing by tag 'lt6502b' gives other posts that have pictures of the motherboard. https://www.maddox.pro/?cat=65 (update: the codeberg link has all the relevant pics)

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In the retro world we’ve already had the incongruent “64k RAM vs 8GB Storage” conundrum to deal with for decades.

My Oric Atmos with LOCI rig has every bit of software every developed for the Oric, ever, stored on its 8GB USB stick and literally has ~8GB left in storage. It used space is more like a rounding error at this point.

I hope that changes, though! ;)

Old computers never die - their users do!

Paula’s intention, I believe, is to make computing approachable again - her many, many synthesizer designs encode a form of nostalgic whimsy for older technology, and she produced a full-scale CPU project using only logic chips for the purposes of education - and as I know she is a huge UFO (TV Series) fan, she’s got a fair bit of creative potential being applied to the alt-computing track of things.

As a retro- nerd myself, I hope to see her laptop in action in real life some day. Would be awesome to see an Oric-1/Atmos ROM for it ..

The goal is to make systems which AI cannot run on, yet still have value for simple compute tasks. Everything else is a cover for this truth.

Oh, it is very much a truth, I agree. The machine is the purpose - you can see it in all of her designs, which are very directed, intentionally, towards well-stated goals.

As for the goal of making systems which cannot run AI - this goal has always been intrinsically fulfilled by Moores law. For as long as we were progressing towards the singularity, we were incapable of it. Whether that is of importance now, as if it were ever not, is a matter of interest in the results: do we panic about AI now, or 20 years ago?

I think that there is enough of Paula Maddox out there to prove we don’t really need AI to do great things, just great people.

The 6502 can't actually address more than that. The flash controller built into modern SD cards are also going to be significantly more powerful than the 6502. And I'm surprised you can even buy SD cards that small still!

> The 6502 can't actually address more than that.

Unless you use bank switching, which historically a lot of 6502 machines did use (e.g. Apple III/IIe/IIc, BBC Master 128, Commodore 128, Commodore CBM-II, etc)

Quick note that bank switching does not in fact allow the CPU to "address" more than 64K. It allows the machine to "have" more than 64K but only 64K of it can be addressed by the CPU at any time.

The MOS 6509 has bank switching hardware built into the CPU, instead of being on an external MMU chip such as the MOS 8722.

What makes the CBM-II's 6509 fundamentally different from the C128's 8502+8722 combo? And what makes either fundamentally different from the segmentation scheme of the 8086/8088?

And could you imagine how painful it would be to manage megabytes of RAM with bank switching on a 6502!

Bank switching is how nearly all the major computers and consoles managed to address larger than 64k carts and memory.

The C64 actually had 64K of ram, 4k of devices (graphics, sound etc) and 16K of ROM.

A pic in a different post shows the 48k ram chip, and not far away is an SD card of 1 gigabyte - that's a dramatic contrast

Incidentally, cheap MP3/MP4 players in the last decade had a few hundred KB of RAM, an 8-bit CPU at a few dozen MHz, and a few GB of NAND flash: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player

> an 8-bit CPU at a few dozen MHz

The 80C51 is just never going away is it? I mean there's no reason for it to.

The 8051 is just about 'free' in the sense that all it's patents, etc., have expired. So anyone who says "I need to throw a bit of microcontroller at this problem" can either grab a sub-pennies device or throw a bit of no cost/low cost 8051 IP in a tiny corner of an FPGA or ASIC and leverage 50 something years of experience, tooling, examples, etc. It's not as cool as a ARM or RISC-V, but it serves a purpose.

That's a CompactFlash card. You often see them used in places where an IDE drive would have been.

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