[vcf-midatlantic] C64 workhorse survivor

[David Riley]

On Sep 29, 2016, at 1:47 PM, Dave McGuire via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic at lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
> 
> On 09/28/2016 02:40 PM, Jason Perkins via vcf-midatlantic wrote:
>> It's amusing to consider NT4e "huge", the whole thing runs off of an
>> 8gb IDE hard drive, with 2 2gb FAT partitions. The whole thing takes
>> up only 700mb, 8mb of which is the configuration and logging database.
>> But... compared to 100s of KB in a C64 it is much more overhead :)
> 
>  It's all relative.  I work with embedded systems with no mass storage,
> but a full IP stack and cellular communications, along with sensor I/O
> and data acquisition/reduction, with a less than 120KB code footprint.
> Controlling an HVAC system (for example) doesn't really involve much
> more than that.

A fun followup to this thread:

http://www.geek.com/news/commodore-amiga-computer-has-been-running-the-acheat-in-19-schools-for-30-years-1625147/

Of course, an Amiga 2000 is a significantly bigger beast than a C64, but somewhat smaller than an NT4 box with a multi-GB hard drive.

The article, of course, does highlight the major problem with such systems that usually are the main thing that lead to their replacement: maintenance (which is why my old company ended up making a Core2 Duo real-time NI system to replace a steel mill's old Multibus-based controller; the system worked, but was dying, and spares were becoming nearly impossible to find even on eBay).


- Dave



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