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What would be a comparable early computer with the same computational power? Amazing to think how a machine the size of a room is now only a penny!


It's an 8-bit processor running at up to 20Mhz. Maybe an Apple-II would be a comparison. Likely the 6502 had a more powerful instruction set. Apple II had a 1Mhz 6502.


This chip: 8 MHz, 8 bit processing  1K x 14 bits EPROM.  48 bytes SRAM.  6 general purpose I/O pins (GPIO), PB[5:0], with independent direction control.

In comparison to the usual suspects like Apollo guidance computer or TI-83, it has a higher clock speed but shorter word length and extremely limited ram and memory. Precisely due to the cost engineering - this is meant to run simple, limited size programs.


The 8051, first released in 1980, the 8051 effectively created the microcontroller market. 4kB ROM and 128B of SRAM for the original 8051. It always was on the small side.

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We have to go earlier than 1980 but I'm not quite familiar with all of those computers.




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