I remember messing with chips like this decades ago with my Uncle making light boards and basic controllers, but they were no where near $10 then  

Folks think ARM is only for the phones and tablets and such, fact is that both ARM and Intel go all the way down into the little bitty stuff.

Somebody wanted to mock the performance of the lunar mission onboard computer, they were upset because they couldn't get anything slow enough any more -- not even calculator chips are that slow any more.

Some folks trying to run original video game software are upset that it runs too too fast (no wait states were supported by the software as none were needed back then).

People who open up an old linux game are disappointed now that it opens in a postage stamp sized video window and the game is playing itself in training demo mode faster than they can follow ....

And yes, they have ported over some first person shooter style things into Android ---- you can run some of the old nuggets now on a tablet or phone that USED TO MAKE FOLKS UPGRADE THEIR PCS just to run the silly things when they first came out.

Raspberry PI surprises me every other week the things people are doing with them.

And guess what, Linux isn't shabby at all (nor is Android or Apple OSi)

..... and none of them are x86 based code.

verslagen1 wrote on 11/19/12 at 17:29:34:


486 chips came out in 1990

Apollo landing was in 1969

1972 was the year of the very first Intel chipset which was the 8008 (great grandfather of the 8088)

Naw, to get a NASA grade chip you got to go WAY WAY back, to the Texas Instruments / Fairchild Semiconductor calculator chip precursors.

Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments demonstrated the first working integrated circuit in 1958. It was originally designed for the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA. Robert Noyce, co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and then Intel Corp. came up with his own idea of an integrated circuit half a year later that solved many practical problems that Kilby's had not. Noyce's chip was made of silicon, whereas Kilby's design chip was made of germanium.

Within a decade, the Apollo program became one of the first major users of the integrated circuit.  The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which guided the Command Module (CM) and Lunar Module (LM) spacecraft of the Apollo program, was one of the first integrated-circuit based computers.  Because sending a large madd into space cost a great deal of money, NASA saw that it could use the integrated circuit to cut down weight and power consumption.  All of the components could be put on a small chip rather than a large board with individual transistors and other circuit components.

Early applications of the integrated circuit were tied to the Apollo missions. Because sending a large mass into space cost a great deal of money, NASA needed to cut down on weight and power consumption. Once the integrated circuit was developed, NASA was able to achieve this goal since all of the components could be put on a small chip rather than a large board with individual transistors and other circuit components. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC), which guided the Command Module (CM) and Lunar Module (LM) spacecraft of the Apollo program, was one of the first integrated-circuit based computers.

Oldfeller--FSO wrote on 11/19/12 at 18:06:10:


Don't mean to nit a pick, but the first was for the 4004 in 1971.  It was a 16 pin 4 bit CPU.  I only know this because I built a single board computer with toggle switches and LEDs based on the 4040 (the 4004's successor).  Why?   Remember the old song "I Gotta Be Me"?  The 4040 then begat the 8080, which begat the 8085, and so on.   One little known fact was that the 8086 (16 bit CPU) preceded the 8088, which was internally a 8086 but used 2 bus cycles to get 16 bits of data (8 bit memory was cheaper).   Anyway, there's some history that I doubt anyone cares about cept me - LOL.

verslagen1 wrote on 11/20/12 at 09:17:20:


Wow!   That's uncanny!

Way cool!   Would love to get my hands on one of those CPU's on eBay.  I worked with DEC PDP-8s in the old days that used core (rope) memory.   The cool thing was, there was no "booting"; i.e., you could turn the power off at night, and when you turned it back on in the morning the computer was in exactly the same state you left it.

It's interesting that the ARM BASIC chip I started this thread with could have easily carried out the entire computational portion of the mission, and still have plenty of horsepower left for a simultaneous game of chess.  Uh oh, visions of HAL2000... "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that".