From Pi to 8086
Yesterday I finally got my "Raspberry Pi"... and after unpacking it, I couldn't stop being nostalgic: "Wow, what a step my first computer... my good old 8086".
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I used to live in France, and I used to have an old 8086 (my first own computer - thanks Dad!). It was a piece of hardware: a huge box, a huge screen... Internally it was a beauty: nothing compared to today's PCs where the cabling is always a big mess, the cases have always issues with dust etc. But, what an evolution when I try to compare it to my new toy.
Memory, my precious: 640k of RAM was cool. But sometimes, after booting or running a few programs, there was not enough to run stuff. Optimization was not about "add more memory" or "run garbage collector". I remember, it was about writing the perfect "autoexec.bat" with its "config.sys" and avoid loading unnecessary drivers etc.
10M of hard-disk; that was alright; I don't really remember having troubles with that; of course, at that time I had no digital camera producing M of picture files everyday! And it was so easy and fast to backup: just a bunch of floppy disks and I was done.
CGA graphics, 320x200 resolution, 16 colors... wow! Luckily the word processor program did not need that to run, it was just fine in text mode. And for games it was only the beginning and that was, well, a start.
A 5 1/4 inch-drive! I am wondering if theses disks still have data on them. One day I should try to hook-up an old drive to check that!
Furthermore, this PC was:
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... I used to live in France, and I used to have an old 8086 (my first own computer - thanks Dad!). It was a piece of hardware: a huge box, a huge screen... Internally it was a beauty: nothing compared to today's PCs where the cabling is always a big mess, the cases have always issues with dust etc. But, what an evolution when I try to compare it to my new toy.
Memory, my precious: 640k of RAM was cool. But sometimes, after booting or running a few programs, there was not enough to run stuff. Optimization was not about "add more memory" or "run garbage collector". I remember, it was about writing the perfect "autoexec.bat" with its "config.sys" and avoid loading unnecessary drivers etc.
10M of hard-disk; that was alright; I don't really remember having troubles with that; of course, at that time I had no digital camera producing M of picture files everyday! And it was so easy and fast to backup: just a bunch of floppy disks and I was done.
CGA graphics, 320x200 resolution, 16 colors... wow! Luckily the word processor program did not need that to run, it was just fine in text mode. And for games it was only the beginning and that was, well, a start.
A 5 1/4 inch-drive! I am wondering if theses disks still have data on them. One day I should try to hook-up an old drive to check that!
Furthermore, this PC was:
- A good source of heating.
- A noisy computer.
- (Probably) A terrific Watts-eater...
... so right, the "Raspberry Pi" is amazing: so small, so silent... and it runs on USB power!
But, enough nostalgia (even though it is always good to remind us where we come from and see the actual evolution), now I don't have an excuse anymore. I shall return to one of my passions: embedded software development!
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