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Comment by stevekemp | Hacker News Reader

I'd compare to a z80 with 64k of memory, which would be enough to run CP/M. That wouldn't allow TLS, or music playback, but it would allow wordperfect, turbo pascal, a bunch of old C-compilers, and a spreadsheet or two.

I don't think anybody would use such a machine full-time, but with a radio and a cabin it would suffice for offline work.

Of course there's no native CP/M for the 6502, but remakes have been made..

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That's not entirely true. A quick search turned up a few projects, e.g. this one: https://github.com/davidgiven/cpm65 (it's a port, so I would consider that to be 'native' rather than a 'remake')

I guess we can argue technicalities, but since the processor is different, and the 6502 handles the zero-page specially the end result is that you have to rebuild/recompile your binaries to run them under cpm65.

In that sense I'd regard it as a remake, rather than a port. But it's impressive it is possible at all, and it does look like a fun project. (I remember watching some of the porting/building videos when I was working on my own understanding of CP/M for emulation purposes.)

>or music playback

We had record players for that, and Walkmans for when we were out and about.

It's true that a computer can do everything, as long as you carve out exceptions for anything the computer can't do, but it seems like a rather pointless position. I feel quite comfortable saying that "most actual workloads people have" includes the functions once embodied by radio, TV, record/tape/CD players, and more.

> I don't think anybody would use such a machine full-time, but with a radio and a cabin it would suffice for offline work.

As late as 1997 I was repairing Amstrad PCWs that were still in Real Live Active Service on oil platforms.

And then after that, I was reading those funny 3" disks in and converting them to WordPerfect.

And then from WordPerfect to Word, a little later.

Be the guy selling shovels I guess.

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