
1984, the Year of the 32-bit Microprocessor (1984) - indigodaddy
https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-01/page/n135
======
elwell
Paged through some and found an article on Speech Recognition [0]:

Most interesting sentence: "Currently, it is not likely that such techniques
would be used for domestic surveillance."

    
    
        Philosophical Issues
        The specter of Big Brother may not be of concern in
        Western society today, but the evolution of distributed 
        intelligence among machines with speech-recognition
        capability certainly provides the technical base for
        monitoring our activities. In fact, the U.S. National
        Security Agency has developed what may be the world's most
        advanced speech-recognition algorithms. This system spots
        keywords in intercepted verbal transmissions from
        "unfriendly" nations. Currently, it is not likely that
        such techniques would be used for domestic surveillance.
        But speech technologists as well as the public must be
        aware of the potential loss of privacy.
    

[0] - [https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1984-01/page/n213](https://archive.org/details/byte-
magazine-1984-01/page/n213)

~~~
stevenwoo
This was five years before a 10000 dollar dedicated speech recognition card
would be available for home PC's, I remember when we got one for testing when
I was working during college at IBM and it was huge like those double slot
graphics cards one can buy today, now we can do the equivalent on our phones -
it's hard to predict sometimes how fast or where technology is going to
advance.

------
snvzz
By the requisites they list, which focus on the ISA, the original 68000 was
already a 32bit architecture in 1979, but it would indeed take until 68020 in
1984 for the CPU to have a 32bit bus and for 32bit operations to not be
internally split into 16bit ones.

I admire the foresight of Motorola in making the ISA itself 32bit from the get
go.

~~~
djmips
According to Sophie Wilson, one of the reasons Acorn decided to go ahead with
their own CPU design was the fact that in 1983 the 68000 and other
contemporary CPUs were bottle-necked on memory access.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Of course within a few years _everything_ was bottle necked on memory access
and the advantages of processors that could do memory access in few cycles
(like the 6502 or early ARM) doesn't mean much anymore, as CPU speeds easily
outstripped memory speeds.

~~~
aidenn0
Wider memory buses were still less bottlenecked than narrower though. See the
transition from 32 to 64 to 128 to 256.

POWER9 has an absurd setup which is 192 bits wide at the CPU (2 controllers
each with 4 24 bit DMI interfaces), but each DMI has a 256 bit path t memory.

[https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ibm/microarchitectures/power9](https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/ibm/microarchitectures/power9)

------
klodolph
For some history—the early Macs in 1984 used 24-bit addressing. The 68000
itself had a 24-bit address bus, but the address registers were 32 bits. So
you could use the top 8 bits for some extra data, and programs actually did
this (including ROMs/system software for early Macs). This meant that your
memory would max out at 8 MiB, with the other half of the address space used
for something else (ROM?).

When System 7 came out, 32-bit addressing became available but not all
software was “32-bit clean”. So you could enable or disable 32-bit addressing
in the memory control panel. This is similar to the A20 gate on IBM PCs.

By 1993 or so the hardware was no longer built to support 24-bit addressing.
PowerMacs followed soon after.

~~~
saagarjha
I wonder if we’ll ever have to make today’s software “64-bit clean”.

~~~
wvenable
The address space of AMD64 was designed so that both the upper and lower
spaces of the address are used when using less than 64 bus lines specifically
to _address_ this problem.

~~~
jdsully
That only ensures the programmer fixes the pointer before dereference.

Tagged pointers that don’t make it to the bus are still a compatibility
problem. It means malloc() can’t return an address overlapping the tagged
bits.

~~~
saagarjha
malloc usually gets _more_ aligned with time, not less. The tagging we're
talking about goes in the high bits of a pointer.

~~~
jdsully
Yes and as memory increases more of the high bits are used as actual address
bits. X64 started with 40 physical bits. We’re now at 48.

------
aidenn0
This was an interesting year for S-100, and it's reflected in the ads. The
writing was on the wall for the S-100 bus on microcomputers (the PC platform
was displacing it), so they were pivoting to the high-end (look at the S-100
SBCs designed to be used in larger installations, the way that VME would
eventually be used). There's a good mix of ads for both applications in this
issue. The standard was eventually retired 10 years later.

------
Davesjoshin
Page 147 shows an advertisement for computers and parts. One of the companies
present is a Pied Piper.

~~~
ggambetta
You mean... you mean they figured out time travel tech???

------
acqq
From the same BYTE, something even today can be recognized as an absolutely
amazing achievement:

[https://ia600609.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages....](https://ia600609.us.archive.org/BookReader/BookReaderImages.php?zip=/10/items/byte-
magazine-1984-01/BYTE-1984-01_jp2.zip&file=BYTE-1984-01_jp2/BYTE-1984-01_0184.jp2&scale=8&rotate=0)

Turbo Pascal - IBM Pascal - Pascal MT+

Price: 49.95 | 300.00 | 595.00

Compile and Link Speed: 1 sec | 97 sec | 90 sec

Execution speed: 2.2 sec | 9 sec | 3 sec

Disk Space 16 bit: 33K with editor! | 300K + editor | 225K + editor

Disk space 8 bit: 28K with editor! | Not Available | 158K + editor

...

Locates Run Time errors directly in source code: YES | NO | NO

\----

Extended Pascal for your IBM PC, APPLE CP/M, MSDOS, CP/M 86, CCP/M 86 or CP/M
80 computer features:

\- Full screen interactive editor providing a complete menu driven program
development environment.

\- 11 significant digits in floating point arithmetic.

\- Built-in transcendental functions.

\- Dynamic strings with full set of string handling features

\- Program chaining with common variables.

\- Random access data files.

\- Full support of operating system facilities.

\- And much more.

------
michaelhoffman
The ads in this issue for long-forgotten products are amazing.

~~~
indigodaddy
Yes quite a treasure trove I noticed as well. A lot of disk copying services
it seemed?

------
AnimalMuppet
Ah, what days those were! Expecting the 68020 to be twice as fast as the 68000
at the same clock speed? Wow. Today we get table scraps of improvement. (On
the other hand, the baseline is much higher now...)

~~~
snvzz
>(On the other hand, the baseline is much higher now...)

Which unfortunately hasn't resulted in a more responsive user experience.

Faster CPUs just meant that optimising code got less important. Now, we're
stuck with a bloated stack, top to bottom.

~~~
matheusmoreira
For some reason latency keeps getting worse.

[https://danluu.com/input-lag/](https://danluu.com/input-lag/)

------
mhd
Interesting to read about the NS32k. The only thing I ever heard it used was
the Ceres workstation of the ETH Zurich, the native platform of Wirth's Oberon
OS.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Jack Tramiel's Atari Corp. evaluated the NS32k series for use in their Atari
ST. They even built a prototype. But the processor had bugs and quality issues
and they went with the 68k instead. I understand NS did fix their issues but
by then it was too late and it never caught on outside of anything but
embedded applications (apparently used in laser printers...)

------
wbhart
The Zilog z80000 wasn't introduced until 1986, but was pipelined and was in
some respects about 6 years ahead of Intel. Apparently they are still used
today in embedded application, though there was one moderately successful
machine based on them back in the day.

~~~
dfawcus
I recall learning of the z80000 (via a datasheet) in '88, but never managed to
find a machine using it.

I know of machines designed and built with the z8000, but I've only heard of
the z80000 being used for embedded devices (possibly one main customer?).

Are you able to provide a reference to an actual general purpose computer
built around the z80000?

------
ThomasBHickey
I still have one of the original Apollo/Domain (DN300?) motherboards. It has
_two_ Motorola MC68000L8 chips on it. It was explained to me that Apollo found
they needed both of them to make virtual memory work. 32 bit data width, 16
bit data bus.

~~~
that_jojo
It's worth going into why the two CPUs.

Basically, the original 68000 isn't capable of atomically restarting an
instruction interrupted during a memory access cycle, and so there's no way to
implement a standard MMU.

So Apollo just chucked in a slave CPU that would detect the interruption of
the master CPU, halt it, deal with any remapping or what have you, and then
just completely reset the master CPU.

~~~
snvzz
Also worth noting that this was solved in 68010 by changing the exception
stack frame.

On that regard, it's a shame the Amiga released (1985) with a 68000 cpu.
Particularly, move from SR became privileged 010+ and thus caused problems
when Amiga finally moved past 68000. Those could have been easily avoided by
releasing Amiga on 68010 to begin with, which is also a CPU with slightly
higher IPC.

They compounded the issue by using 68000 _again_ on A500/A2000 (1987), for
negligible savings.

Of course, this does pale next to the gross mismanagement Commodore did of the
Amiga thereon, which ultimately led to Commodore's own demise.

------
erwan577
This byte article does not seems concerned about the choice of endianness
(big-endian or little-endian).

~~~
magoghm
Endianness matters when you share binary data between computers with different
architectures. That didn't happen that often in 1984.

