

Thoughts on the Memory Efficiency of iCab and Programming in the 80s (1999) - talos
http://www.icpug.org.uk/national/journals/jnls2000/ej600/art6.htm

======
userbinator
I'm surprised at the lack of any mention of the demoscene in an article about
extreme software efficiency.

But there is a general observation that whenever there is an abundance of a
resource, people will tend to act like it's effectively infinite. This has
been true of the forestry industry, gas and oil (remember when fuel efficiency
was barely a concern for cars?), etc. Software is only one of the more recent
systems to follow this trend. I've always found it ironic that multitasking
didn't bring more prominence to the issue, since every application is then in
direct competition with every other application running on the system, and if
they all act like they can use all the memory and CPU, none of them will get
what they want.

~~~
vardump
"JIT" techniques were pretty common. Well, first write code to memory and then
run it. Often used for drawing lines etc. Simplest implementations just
modified code in memory, more complicated actually built the function byte by
byte.

------
vardump
From the article:

> The only way to get an 8-bit 1.44Mhz machine with 64K of memory

It was below 1 MHz, I remember there were 63 microseconds per horizontal line
(PAL). So the clock frequency must have been a bit below 1 MHz, maybe 0.98 MHz
or so.

~~~
Narishma
The PAL version was slightly below (0.985 Mhz) and the NTSC version slightly
above (1.023 Mhz).

