> Basic is just not particular useful and has a lot of funny behavior or missing parts for any serious project.
I think it is an interesting teaching tool. It has a lot of limitations that place it close to the machine level - all variables being global, no real named functions, and so on. It grounds the expectations about what a computer can and can't do - all the fancy things we do are smoke and mirrors layered on top of a very simple machine.
It is true, I did learn Basic (QBasic) first, as elementary school student, and C second. What made it particular good was the F1 help. I think it is still one of the best help systems I ever used. Good intro and F1 while pointing on any function and instant help, easy to understand. Additionally no complicated include and compiling. But at the same time, I think I could also teach simple C or JS to an elementary school student. It is just the help and runtime that is bad. Somehow still today there is no major language system that does all of this well. Curious...
It was owned by the University across the street (Colorado State University). The mother of one of my friends was a Systems Programmer. We had a blast learning all about the machines.
And here I am measuring the distance from Dublin (Ireland) to Holyhead - would be ok for fast rail, but then it's between 3 to 5 hours of rail to London.
I wonder if Ryanair pays rail companies to offer poor service.
You'd want to look at various "max" ship designations, which are based on various dimensions: overall length and beam, draft, and height above waterline (generally to accommodate bridges). These correspond to various canals and harbours. E.g., "Panamax", "Suezmax", and "Chinamax".
The tallest ship I'm aware of is the Pioneering Spirit, a catamaran / split-hull oil-platform service vessel, originally conceived as being built on two supertanker hulls. Given its mission, it might actually operate in the vicinity of the Irish Sea.
The maximum designated naval architecture stated vertical dimension standard I'm aware of is Suezmax, with a 68m (223 ft) air draft, shown in this Wikipedia article: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_ship#Size_categories>. (There are standards with unlimited air drafts as well, but I suspect most ships will fall within bounds of the largest stated.)
Oh, and another option would be for a tunnel-bridge hybrid, as with the Øresund Bridge, with tunnels to either side of Beaufort's Dyke and a bridge spanning that portion. I'm not aware of that being proposed though I suspect someone's thought of it. This would make for unlimited ship height through the passage overall. The Øresund span's clearance is 57m, FWIW.
Isn't the issue the depth of the Irish Sea at the point where Scotland and Ireland are closest? It gets to around 1,000 ft deep there (roughly 5x where the Channel Tunnel goes) and has a bunch of unexploded WW2 bombs dumped there, too.
Then Dublin to Holyhead is, what, 70 miles? That's twice as long as the Seikan tunnel, which I think is the world's longest under sea tunnel.
I think it isn’t that deep - last time I checked it was reasonable, but you make a good point about unexploded ordnance. Building it would be a thrill.
I’d also mention the ascent of the Apollo 17 LM. The camera could be commanded to move up to follow the ascent, but the command had to be given ahead of time, from the MOCR, to coincide with the launch, which was commanded from the LM. The audio from the LM was delayed, as was the video from the camera, and the command would take about a second to reach the camera on the moon.
Dream big. Imagine what we could do with a 5 GHz 6502.
Of course, the memory would need to be on the same die to be able to function at that speed, but my Apple //e had a full megabyte of RAM (in addition to the 64 on the motherboard) and, IIRC, Apple’s bank switching scheme could accommodate up to 16 megs. The chip would be mostly SRAM.
Talking to anything outside the chip would slow things down considerably though, and using one in place of a real 6502 would be comically weird. It’d feel like a machine that spends 99.999999% of the time waiting for IO.
Which, amusingly, feels the opposite of mainframes, where the machine appears to never have to wait for IO.
I think that would be approaching diminishing returns long before getting to 5GHz. If the only real requirement is "you can write a new value to any register on every cycle" then you need nowhere near that level of overshooting. 20MHz might not be enough (I only mentioned that value because there is an actual commercial product, the SuperCPU, that brought 20MHz 65816 to the C64/128), but 48 or 50MHz might fully cover that. Maybe 60MHz if you want to do other processing on lines where you have to slow down to communicate with the rest of the hardware (which requires slowing down to bus speed - even the base-level C128 could not use 2MHz mode with the VIC-IIe display enabled, as the extra 2MHz cycles stomped on the bus, making the VIC-II display what was essentially open bus).
Mine was never an exercise in practicality - it would be ridiculous to implement, and complete overkill.
OTOH, I wonder if someone would build something like this - a 6502/65816 with lots of SRAM and system-bus compatible timings - using the cheapest commercially available foundry, how much could it cost.
The first time I used an IBM PC I was so disappointed. On every aspect of the interaction my Apple II would run rings about it. Character IO via the BIOS on CGA was glacial to avoid writing to VRAM and getting snow, and an 8088 at 4.77 MHz was not nearly 4.77 times faster than the 6502 at 1 MHz - in fact, it felt slower.
It’s not that the 8088 was a horrible CPU - it was a pretty ok one - it’s just that the 6502 was a beast of a CPU.
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