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| A 35th anniversary salute to Radio Shack's TRS-80 |
| By Thom Holwerda on 2012-08-04 04:17:08 |
| "Quick - name the most important personal computer of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Those of you who mentioned the legendary Apple II - that's fine. I respect your decision. Forced to think objectively in 2012, I may even agree. But if you just named Radio Shack's TRS-80, you made me smile. Your choice is entirely defensible. And back in the TRS-80's heyday, I not only would have agreed with it but would have vehemently opposed any other candidate." |
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| RE[4]: Nothing special |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-05 09:17:42 |
|
> Programming now is combining libs and APIs using a programming language that has a command for every operation that had made you think in the 70/80s. My job is based in consultancy solutions built on top of JVM and .NET languages, every time I am allowed to use C++, I rejoice at the possibility of using a language with native code implementations, even if it is C++. |
 - Score: 3 |
| RE[5]: Nothing special |
| By MOS6510 on 2012-08-05 09:25:05 |
| How much faster does C++ perform vs .NET you reckon? |
| - Score: 2 |
| Fond memories.... |
| By rdean400 on 2012-08-05 10:00:14 |
| My grandfather got a TRS-80 a few months after release. Over time, the unit was upgraded, replaced with a model 3, and upgraded to a model 4 with graphics. He also had a model 4p. He bought my family our first computer - a CoCo. We later bought a CoCo 2 and then a CoCo 3 to go along with it. It was fun to hack on those machines. |
| - Score: 1 |
| Home Computer Day at NASA |
| By ricegf on 2012-08-05 12:54:58 |
|
I worked for NASA Langley in the early 80's, programming flight display software for their Atari 800s in assembly (SynAssembler, to be specific). We held a "bring your home computer to work" day, and the variety was amazing - from Sinclair (a tiny Z80 with membrane keyboard and no sound) to Commodore Vic 20s and 64s to Apple ][ to TRS-80 regular and CoCo flavors to Atari 400s and 800s to homebrews. I still remember that single event as the pinnacle of the golden age of home computing. I'm afraid we weren't in general impressed by the classic TRS-80's monochrome text-only display (though in fairness, it did 64-character widths with ease compared to the others' artifact-fringed 40-character or the Vic-20's 22(!)-character version). In retrospect, it had other nice features, too such as a real Z-80, the Cadillac of 8-bits. Computers had actual hardware innovation in those heady halcyon days. Fond, fond memories... |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[6]: Nothing special |
| By lucas_maximus on 2012-08-05 15:43:02 |
|
Depends whether it is managed C++ or not. TBH I managed to get some pretty good performance increases in modern Java and .NET by just thinking about an if ... then ... else blocks. With T-SQL etc you still have to think about the best way to write a query ... the optimizer will only do soo much for you. While you can write small programs and let modern CPUs and Ram and mainly not worry ... but once there are quite a few people hitting it you really have to start thinking. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: TRS-80 |
| By zima on 2012-08-05 15:44:45 |
|
Well if you had such extensive early BASIC experience... ;p http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evan... > It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration. (glancing over Wiki TI-99/4a article, even more curious machine ...and possibly even more unbalanced in a way, 16-bit CPU) |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[7]: Comment by Morgan |
| By zima on 2012-08-05 15:49:10 |
|
> The consensus seems to be that since AdvanceMAME uses SDL, once we get a form of 2D GPU support for SDL the performance will be more inline with modern x86 hardware. Kinda doubtful. Well sure, if the output display is completely unaccelerated now, VESA-style, proper drivers should somewhat help... but, ultimately, MAME is almost exclusively about the CPU. And the RPi CPU is presumably comparable to "a 300MHz Pentium 2" ( http://www.raspberrypi.org/faqs ) - considering what MAME strives for (accuracy and code elegance more than speed; it even tends to slow down over time, with improvements in accuracy), even a bit weird that only a few are unplayable (unless there's some pre-selection going on, focusing mostly on games which are perceived to have any chance at all in the first place) |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: You mean Rat Shack? |
| By zima on 2012-08-05 15:55:13 |
|
Sometimes I think such speakers should be outright banned. I stumbled once on a pair, bought by family member (talked into them by a small-shop seller, at 1/3-1/2 the price of a decent 2.1; plus and audio card ...for a PC which never saw any audio playback), that even managed to be definitely worse than any laptop speaker I heard - hell, they were much worse in audio quality than my old clock radio (monaural, but I'd still prefer listening to it). Frankly, they would hardly be worth the energy expenditure needed to carry them to trash container. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[6]: Nothing special |
| By moondevil on 2012-08-05 16:30:28 |
|
> How much faster does C++ perform vs .NET you reckon? It depends on your use case, but there is nothing like native code if you want to squeeze the performance out of the machine. With C++ you have more control over the data structure layouts to optimize the caches usage. Shorter startup times and easy distribution of binaries. Plus thanks to intrinsics it is easy to exploit SIMD and GPGPU capabilities. Now, it is possible to compile .NET applications directly to native code by making use of NGEN, but even with .NET 4.0 there are some limitations on NGEN code quality vs JIT. Microsoft actually acknowledges this in two ways: - NGEN is being improved in .NET 4.5; - A few months ago they had listed on their careers web site, open positions for C# native code compilers engineers This second point is actually what I would like to have. A C# compiler that targets native code directly for distribution, while using the CLR during development. |
| - Score: 2 |
| RE[2]: Still have a Model 100 laptop |
| By KLU9 on 2012-08-05 16:40:28 |
| I was just microblogging the other day about how the Model 100 was my 1st computer, and I saw that Bill Gates coded *on* it ( http://oldcomputers.net/trs100.h... ) , but fun to learn that he also coded *for* it. thx for that link. |
| - Score: 2 |
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