Now that's old-school cool: Microsoft techies slap Azure Sphere IoT chip in an Altair 8800 Hidden away among the interminably long keynote speeches at Microsoft's recent Build event was a project to delight the retro enthusiast. Observing that "Microsoft is all about backwards-compatibility", Mike Hall and the Azure Sphere bunch demonstrated how far they could take that theme by sticking one of Redmond's IoT …
Side-note:
Would happily pay for a cloud-emulator filled with licensed game titles that I could purchase, for all the retro consoles.
So long as it wasn't a recurring subscription, it ran at decent speeds (hell, why not an HTML5 version?) and it was from a big name that wasn't going to disappear tomorrow.
Do you know how much faffing some platforms have to go through to play a simple game?
Then could then sell it with their consoles, etc. (e.g. Nintendo's one could replace all that Virtual Console nonsense that they keep reinventing for all the new platforms) and have one service that basically pulls down all the old content but works on anything.
"So long as it wasn't a recurring subscription"
There is instantly a problem - If its cloud-based, then the seller has got to maintain the infrastructure and pay electricity. Customers would Bjork at the price the company would have to charge in order to cover costs of maintaining it, plus add on some margin.
I'll happily pay a subscription, as long its reasonable and total inclusive.. What I will not accept, is micro-transactions!
Your arguments about hosting costs are quite logical, but take a look at Quake Live and find that they are not necessarily always true.
That said, I'm totally with you as far as micro-transactions are concerned.
Yes, but there's a model that nobody ever does:
- Purchase the game/video/whatever. You "own" it. It's yours. You don't need to pay again.
- Subscribe with a minimal fee to access the service.
- If you don't pay, you lose access to the service BUT YOU CAN RESTORE IT, even ten years down the line, by paying for it again, and get access to your purchases back.
1) Only users actually using the service need pay.
2) You don't need to keep servers running "in case" someone jumps on quickly. They have to pay first.
3) Users don't lose their purchases, so they're more likely to make them.
4) You can price it so that 1 month of access costs more than just keeping the existing subscription going.
This stops the problems of "I paid once I want to access that movie at any time in perpetuity so keep the servers running" vs "If I stop paying even once, I lose all my stuff".
Or poke out the screen and internals of a Macintosh Plus, do the connector black magic (impossible, plus risk of electrocution from the CRT, don't try this at home!) and a Raspberry Pi in there, and boom, a Debian GNU/Linux running on a Motorola 68K, upload on YouTube, and watch the downvotes come.
Edit: Not an accurate analogy, but the YouTube herd have learned the hard way not to troll.
I think all they've done is publicise how difficult it is to get Windows 10 onto another platform. They they took ages to come up with Windows 10 IoT for the Pi and when they did they came up with a nobbled version (Core). Now they have Windows 10 IoT for the Pi, why couldn't they have flipped a few build switches and targetted this other ARM board instead?
"Microsoft is all about backwards-compatibility"
Why then, was it running on a 'Linux variant?
When Microsoft started it was mostly all about 'buy it in',now it's borrowed.
Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue - wayhay!, microsoft can get married, which is apropriate, you'd have to pay me a dowry to use that old maid of a Desktop....
This is novel, but it just goes to show a potential downside of cloud computing...
Previously, to run Microsoft Basic on an Altair 8800 (and never having done this, I could be wrong), you needed an Altair 8800 with the relevant hardware (ram, disk drive, drive controller etc), monitor, electricity.
With this system. they needed an Altair with their board in, a monitor, network hardware, an internet connection, miles of cable, all the various hardware/software used by the telco, and also a handy data centre that just happens to host Azure. In short, there is a lot more that can go wrong.
There is a lot more that can go wrong, there's also a factor of well over a million in the transistor count. The original 8080 had about 4500 transistors, so with a few hundred bytes of RAM and ROM it was in the tens of thousands overall. Now we seem to need gigabytes just to wake up in the morning.
Isn't progress wonderful?
(I mean, yes it is, but this kind of emulation really doesn't prove much other than that the instruction set of a primitive microprocessor can easily be emulated on a much more advanced microprocessor.)
ack about 'the cloud' - "there is a lot more that can go wrong"
'The Cloud' is _highly_ overrated. I'd much rather have everything running without 'teh intarweb' connection.
[but without 'teh intarweb' and "The Cloud", you can't be turned into revenue for 'the providers' - yes, that was a lame star trek reference]
Other than that, I think the RPi PDP 11 was much cooler! (and a bit more old-school)
When the Altair 8800 came out I was very excited until I learned that the timing for the memory was done by a series of cascaded one-shots. I still thought it was clever (forcing instructions to display the registers etc.). I got a tape of the BASIC interpreter and wrote a simulator for the Sigma ( in FORTRAN and actually got it to work, albeit slowly. I still miss the control panels and the blinkenlights.
I still miss the LGP-30 with 4096 words of 31 bits.
some unfortunate PFY had to enter the code an opcode at a time by flipping switches on the front of the case
Don't know about BillG, but in high school in the late 1970s I was one of those PFYs. I worked summers for an academic research group that was doing bleeding-edge automated data capture and analysis from X-ray equipment and GC/mass spec machines using Altairs. (We also had some weird 12-bit computer from a company called Nuclear Data, IIRC.)
Program load was generally done from paper tape. If the machine got shut down or the power went off, though, none of that could happen until BASIC had been toggled in. I still have nightmares about trying to read crappy fifth-generation Xerox* copies of a mimeographed original of the switch positions. Is that an 8, a 5, or a 0? I dunno. If you're wrong, start over from the beginning...
The reward was an hour of wandering through "a twisty little maze of passages, all alike" in text-based D&D, on either a Teletype or (later) a glass terminal.**
* Yes, actual Xerox-brand photocopiers. Big as a house, and 2x as expensive.
** Get off my lawn, kids today have no idea, etc.
The old adventure game was a kick to play. I think i even tried to map the game and kept getting hung up on the twisty-turny tunnels. Lol. Imagining the various rooms and encounters in your mind was all we had back then, but it’d be interesting to put some modern graphics into the program and see how it looks. Even if that happened, the game would probably be considered pretty lame when compared to whats out there now.
xyzzy
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