ChatGPT is a pure conversational model, while Google can integrate this into a vast knowledge model to work with actual facts. (Just speculation; Googler, but no inside info on this.) Of course, as Microsoft adds ChatGPT into Bing they should also integrate it into the rest of their search stack. This will be an interesting horse-race to watch since it won't be just the AI models but also a massive amount of secondary infrastructure for desired outcomes with content safety (no erotica or nazi pamphlets on demand), IP protection (no plagiarism), political and cultural sensibilities, disinfo, and a ton of other problems.
Maintained an in house Java ORM for years, instead of moving to Hibernate like everyone else. Good for me learning lots of cool techniques, bad for company but it was their idea/plan in 1999.
I was a late Spectrum dev, as a Brazilian geek several years behind the international market due to draconian restrictions on computer imports at the time (also, dad not rich enough to get me an Amiga...). Got one of my programs survive for posterity: https://worldofspectrum.org/archive/software/utilities/stk-y... (unfortunately only loading screenshots here; check YS #75).
That was a powerful hacking/debugging/programming utility. I am still proud of the HILOAD command which was capable of loading files from tape in any condition: if any error was found, this command would fill a separate buffer with the relative address of every error. Then you could use other commands to inspect the data and painstakingly recover it by guessing the correct value for damaged bits or bytes (they utility could dump memory in many ways, including some popular encodings of sprites for games). There was also a whole-block SHIFT command useful for this task because a loading error could make all following bytes to be shifted left or right some bits, because the tape data format didn't have a byte-boundary delimiter, it was just a stream of bits.
I'm not sure about this simple comparison of 6502 vs. Z80. Sure the Z80 instructions had higher latencies in clocks, but it also had more registers so you could write the same code with fewer memory load/stores and it had a 16-bit ALU. It also had a fair offering of complex instructions that, while very high-latency, should be faster than the equivalent sequence of simpler instructions and also helped with code density which was critical in systems with a max of 64KB (see https://web.eece.maine.edu/~vweaver/papers/iccd09/iccd09_den...).
For one data point in performance, theultimatebenchmark.org has some Forth benchmarks that apparently show a 4GHz Z80 beating the 6502 by 2X (best scores for each: mc-CP/M Z80 4Mhz / FIG-Forth 1.1 / Fib2 = 1m19s, Apple II 1Mhz / Apple GraForth / Fib2 = 2m19s).
Thanks! Replying a bit here since that post is from 2015. One can write anecdotal examples that are biased both ways. But let's talk about a single issue, the IX/IY registers.
The IX/IY registers are heavyweight but one needs to remember the "best-practices" of that era and architecture. In well optimized Z80 code, the IX/IY registers are often used for critical "global variables" that you can keep all the time in registers across many subroutine calls (think "segment registers": base pointers for important tables or buffers that are not fixed addresses through the whole program). Their performance beats needing frequent indirect load/store from pointers stored in memory via other registers that often need to be preserved/restored.
You can also use some relatively low-latency instructions that involve IX/IY, in particular PUSH/POP were often used in optimized buffer-copy routines: you burn all registers to fetch up to 20 bytes of contiguous data with POPs, then you patch the SP register and issue PUSHs in inverse order to store those 20 bytes in another location; loop if needed for >20 bytes, even with loop overhead this is faster than LDIR/LDDR. Games used that trick all the time for block copies like sprite bitblt or double-buffer animation.
I'll be more convinced by realistic benchmarks, and yes the Fib2 that I quoted before is not impressive even for the standards of CPU microbenchmarks, but maybe someone would know some real-world code that had good ports to both CPUs and could give a better verdict. Unfortunately games are never good choices, the 8-bit systems had radically different architectures for essential features like video and audio so "ports" were often full rewrites even at a high level like rendering strategies... there might be exceptions, like the AI component of a chess game.
MSX was a hit in Brazil largely because of our closed market at the time, where importing computers was always very expensive and often illegal. A computer had to be a "national" product, even if that meant just a clone of foreign machines built with mostly imported parts (and very often violating copyright, e.g. I had a ZX Spectrum clone which manufacturer was sued by Sinclair, unsuccessfully, despite copying even the ROM code). In that environment the MSX was a great solution, local companies could join the party of selling a computer/peripherals/SW that benefited from a (hoped) worldwide market, without the costs of licensing or the hurdles of straight piracy.
The mental part is easy, if you can do that: close your eyes and focus on the background white noise that exists inside your head, until it becomes a clearly audible buzz that oscillates in sync with your pulse.
Virtually all big science/tech projects from early 20th century were state sponsored, so it was difficult for SF writers to imagine a future where important innovation might come from the private sector or emerge from large scale decentralized contributions. Frankly, this is still large true today if you consider that lots of modern stuff comes from tech companies that are becoming as rich and powerful as small nation states, so they can spare a few billions in basic research with long-term or uncertain ROI.
And to be fair with Asimov, he saw some of that for example with "U.S.Robotics", a fictitious private company that invented the positronic brain and had a monopoly on that business. Also, his Encyclopedia Galactica is the creation of a large group of "encyclopedists" who are basically academic elites, something we could see as a Wikipedia-like except that it wasn't produced by millions of joe schmoes but rather by a kind of priesthood of professional intellectuals. (Foundation makes these people work in a centralized organization, but that happens in a late period of the galactic empire, it's my impression that the origins of the Encyclopedia are way more descentralized.)
Oh. I'm not faulting him. When he wrote his books, organizational models were dominated by strict hierarchies whether government or assembly line-type manufacturing companies. Even more collaborative academic research tended to be dominated by big corporate labs and elite research universities. The average person never interacted with mainframe computers directly and information flow was largely mass market broadcast.
Absent any existing examples, the effects brought about by the modern Internet, smartphones, collaborative open source software development, generally less rigid organizational hierarchies, etc. would have been very difficult to visualize. Indeed it would have seemed almost alien.
Old times of hardware designed both for safer Assembly coding, and support for simple OS & compilers thanks to low-level safety... like Obi-Wan would say, "an elegant weapon for a more civilized age".
Strange thing to say, since this particular system was designed specifically for high-level languages like COBOL and ALGOL-60. I don't think it even supported assembly language.
