I was thinking lately about how much memory you could handle on a 6502. The BBC Micro had a 16KB block of RAM paged between up to 16 ROMs/RAM but if you could have 256 banks you could do 4MB. One problem is that that would require a very large PCB. Another problem is that the OS searches for commands on all the ROMs and this would become slow for so many banks; one solution would be to limit the ROMs to the first few banks and let the rest be RAM.

It could be useful for some sort of minicomputer for business applications.

The Commodore REU (RAM Expansion Unit) architecture for the C64/C128 allows for up to 16 MiB - 256 banks of 256 addresses in 256 pages.

Due to the lack of support hardware in the C64 (no hardware RAM bank switching/MMU) this memory is not bank switched and then directly addressable by the CPU, it's copied on request by DMA into actual system RAM. But in some sense, a C64 with a 16 MiB REU is a 6502 with 16 MiB RAM.

But yeah, you want CPU addressable RAM with real bank switching. You couldn't really do 16 MiB, you wouldn't want to bank switch the entire 64 KiB memory space. The Commander X16 (a modern hobbyist 6502 computer) supports up to 2 MiB by having hardware capable of switching 256 banks into an 8 KiB window (2 MiB/256 banks = 8 KiB).

Let's say you design something with 32 KiB pages instead -- that seems kind of plausible, depending on what the system does -- you could then do 256*32 = 8 MiB and still have 32 KiB of non-paged memory space available. I think this looks like just about the maximum you would want to do without the code or hardware getting too hairy.

Depends entirely on what banking scheme you use. Nothing stops you from adding e.g. an 8-bit banking register (even two of them, one for instruction fetches, another one for normal memory reads/writes) to serve as bits 23–16 for the 24-bit memory bus. That's what WDC 65C816 from 1985 does, but it also goes full 16-bit mode as well.

And if you have a 16-bit CPU, you can do all kinds of silly stuff; for instance, you can have 4 16-bit MSRs, let's call them BANK0–BANK3, that would be selected by the two upper bits of a 16-bit address, and would provide top 16 bits for the bus, while the lower 14-bits would come from the original address. That already gives you 30 bits for 1 GiB of addressable physical memory (and having 4 banks available at the same time instead of just 2 is way more comfortable) and nothing stops you from adding yet another 4 16-bit registers BANK0_TOP–BANK3_TOP, to serve as even higher 16 bits of the total address — that'd give you 16+16+14 = 46 bit of physical address (64 TiB) which is only slightly less than what x64 used to give you for many years (48 bits, 256 TiB).

I was trying to get a grasp on what would be pratical.

Even 4MB would take you hours to load from floppies with a 6502.

Terabytes with a 68000 would also be impractical.

> Even 4MB would take you hours to load from floppies with a 6502.

Depends on your clock. Also, you could use some dedicated hardware, like a DMA controller e.g. 8257, or 8237. From 8257's datasheet:

    Speed

    The 8257 uses four clock cycles to transfer byte of
    data. No cycles are lost in the master to master transfer
    maximizing bus efficiency. 2MHz clock input will
    allow the 8257 to transfer at rate of 500K bytes/second.

and I recall 8237 could do even better, if wired and programmed properly.

Hard drivers were available for the 6502. They were expensive ($10k for a 10MB drive as I recall prices came down a lot, but never affordable in the 1980s)

Processing terabytes with a single CPU was impractical, but you could in theory connect it.

I know someone who - in the 1990s had 5MB connected to his Atari. He had two different expansions, and used all the memory for a RAM disk, as a result his BBS was the most responsive remote system I've ever used - including ssh to the server under my desk (open question, was it really or is this nostalgia?).

But they keep churning out the classic watches and they are everywhere and cheap.

Agreed, I love them!

I love how you can put all the games ever made for a given 8 bit platform on a single flash drive.

I was comparing games prices last week and I found that prices from the 80s aren't too different from modern game prices.

Elite was £20 in 1984 and that would be £66 today, which is not very different from what a good game for the PS5 costs today.

Except that games then were made by one or two people and nowadays games are made by teams with coders, musicians, artists, etc.

Yeah, the games industry is in a pretty big crisis right now, and I think change needs to happen both ways:

Consumers need to understand that keeping games at the same price for decades despite rising costs and inflation is not realistic. If they want the industry to thrive, they need to be ok with games being more expensive.

Meanwhile, developers need to stop making games so expensive. This is an entertainment industry / corpo problem, really. Companies have seen the big profits and decided that only the big profits will do, which means you need to make a big open world cinematic experience, which is expensive, and because it's expensive, they won't take risks on making anything actually interesting.

The only way gaming moves forward is if we make riskier games that cost less to produce, which is why indies are the ones making the good games these days.

Pine

Huh, back in the 2001/2002 timeframe I worked at an old company that gave everyone a Windows laptop but us engineers also had UNIX accounts on the server cluster, which we logged into for dev work.

Our company was hit with one of the worms (don’t remember which). Thousands of emails constantly coming in and everyone scrambling to delete them - except people like me, who were on vacation. I returned to an inbox that instantly crashed Outlook. IT was trying to find a solution. But I logged into the UNIX cluster, opened Pine, and deleted all the crap, page by page. When I got most of it done, Outlook started working again.

IT was shocked but then told everyone else to go do what I did, eliminating their need to do any work. So I guess you win some and you lose some..

ILOVEYOU was in 2000 and behaved that way. I remember we just shut off our Exchange servers until there was a fix. Email was still new enough that the world didn't implode.

Couldn't you delete or filter /var/spool/mail?

I am still using mutt.

Neither are Norway and Iceland.

The title says: "European countries" not "EU" which both are different.

Surely the climate and the solitude would be too much for someone from the Mediterranean, for example.

In the movie Thirteen Days, JFK mentions a book titled March of Folly by Barbara Tuchmann. I bought the book on that tip and it has an interesting chapter on Vietnam. I don't think adding a chapter on this "special operation" would even be worth it as it would just be repetitive.

How does that book fit in the timeline? It was published in 1984.

I believe they are mixing it up with The Guns of August (published in 1962, also by Tuchman), which JFK was fond of and supposedly drew on during the Cuban missile crisis.

You are absolutely right. My mistake. I read them both and certainly recommend them.

Thank you. I heard about The Guns of August when I was looking for related books after reading A World Undone. Then I forgot about it. I never heard of March of Folly but I'll read them both.

The author must have never spent much time with an accountant.

Banana Pi makes SBCs with lots of networking ports.