How to fit a large program into a small machine (1980) • Hacker News Board

Re: How to fit a large program into a small machine (1980)

#41

Post by FullyFunctional » Sun, Oct 15, 2023, 8:26 PM UTC

klelatti wrote: post #18

I was surprised to find that a VM was used in the Busicom calculator that was the motivation for and first use of the Intel 4004 microprocessor. Wrote about it here: https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/bytecode-and-the-busico...

Thanks, that was an incredible story and much more detail than I had seen elsewhere. The whole series is a goldmine. Eg. I never knew that the registers in the 4004 were dynamic (ie. a cap + 1 transistor) [1]!

[1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-strangeness-of-the-...

Re: How to fit a large program into a small machine (1980)

#42

Post by FullyFunctional » Sun, Oct 15, 2023, 8:59 PM UTC

From the Z spec (https://www.inform-fiction.org/zmachine/standards/z1point1/s...):

"In practice the text compression factor is not really very good: for instance, 155000 characters of text squashes into 99000 bytes. (Text usually accounts for about 75% of a story file.) Encoding does at least encrypt the text so that casual browsers can't read it. Well-chosen abbreviations will reduce total story file size by 10% or so."

I'm curious about other schemes like this with higher density. Obviously, it's a trade-off between text density and more code in the VM.

Re: How to fit a large program into a small machine (1980)

#43

Post by klelatti » Mon, Oct 16, 2023, 6:26 AM UTC

FullyFunctional wrote: post #41

klelatti wrote: post #18

I was surprised to find that a VM was used in the Busicom calculator that was the motivation for and first use of the Intel 4004 microprocessor. Wrote about it here: https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/bytecode-and-the-busico...

Thanks, that was an incredible story and much more detail than I had seen elsewhere. The whole series is a goldmine. Eg. I never knew that the registers in the 4004 were dynamic (ie. a cap + 1 transistor) [1]! [1] https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-strangeness-of-the-...

Thanks so much! It's a really interesting design.