🚀 go-pugleaf

Steve Firth <filter@firthcom.demon.co.uk> wrote:

> Rebecca and Rowland <real-address-in-sig@rhu.barb.foobar> wrote:
> 
> > I don't doubt it; you can expect more bits to fiddle with once the
> > complexity exceeds a ZX81.
> 
> It doesn't work like that. The chip count on most Macs is lower than
> that of the Nascom. Of course each one does a huge amount more than
> almost the entire Nascom could.

Erm, yes, but I didn't talk about Nascon IIs...  A Mac has more `bits'
than a ZX81, as well as a higher chip count.  It was the `bits' I was
thinking of: once you've got a SCSI bus, expansion bus slots, internal
PSU, VRAM and RAM sockets, sound input and output, so on and so forth,
you have all sorts of `getting things to fit' problems.

(I chose a ZX81 very carefully: it's a simple computer with very few
`bits' and a very low chip count.  The more I think of it, the more it
strikes me that aside from the video modulator, you could argue that the
Manchester Mark 1 was more complex, if slower; mind you, it had a
simpler instruction set and simpler processor.  The Manchester Mark 1
certainly had more memory, a better printer, better keyboard, faster
backing store, and so on.  And a better manual than the average modern
computer; no better than the ZX81's, though.  Yes, I have both).

Rowland.

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