That was beautiful. Nicely done, and congratulations on your restomod A1000! I’ve heard people describe it as a 16 bit computer a few times lately though and it always catches me off guard. It was usually referred to as a 32 bit computer at the time, and defensibly so. Some of its implementation details were 16 bit, like the data bus and ALU, but they were largely invisible to users and programmers. Assembly code use…
It was pretty commonly accepted at the time that the 68000 was a "16-bit CPU" because of its ALU and data bus width, despite the 32-bit being clearly ISA. The Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, for instance, is always referred to as a 16-bit console, even having it embossed right on its shell. The technical truth is that using a single number to describe the "bits" of a CPU is going to be inadequate in many cases (including th…
Re: A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
#41Well, I don't think there was any consensus. Atari played on this with the "ST" (for sixteen/thirty-two) product label. From the software side it was 32bit. The flat, huge (at that time) address space made things so much easier (compared to the awful segmentation of the Intel CPUs then). That the ALU was just 16bits meant that some operations took longer than one would have liked, but was otherwise of no concern. No "far pointers" or any such crutches.