Friday, September 27, 2024

Well that went by fast

Lots of media huffing and puffing, but not much rain (especially when compared with Debbie last month) and not too bad for wind.  Power stayed on the whole time, so yay.

So in lieu of other blog fodder, here's an insanely cool story about a guy who made Linux run on a 1971 Intel 4004 chip:

Hardware hacker Dmitry Grinberg recently achieved what might sound impossible: booting Linux on the Intel 4004, the world's first commercial microprocessor. With just 2,300 transistors and an original clock speed of 740 kHz, the 1971 CPU is incredibly primitive by modern standards. And it's slow—it takes about 4.76 days for the Linux kernel to boot.

...

While it has no practical purpose, the Linux/4004 project demonstrates the flexibility of Linux and pushes emulation to its limits.
Linux on 50 year old hardware has got to be some sort of record.

5 comments:

Chuck Pergiel said...

What's that song? Too much time on my hands? Reminds me of working on DOS batch scripts to install software. Took seconds to write, minutes to test and the test inevitably failed, so you got to do it again and again and again. Just horrible.

JNorth said...

Since someone has to say it; "But can it run Doom?"

LindaG said...

From what I've seen, you were indeed blessed to be missed by the hurricane. There are people I know in Georgia without power.

What patience, to wait 5 days to see if it was working...
Glad you all are safe. God bless.

SiGraybeard said...

Having actually touched a 4004 micro back in the day - but not run one - that story caught my eye. Forget about running Doom; can it do anything useful?

Skyler the Weird said...

It hasnt gone by fast here in NC. Im still waiting on Spectrum to fix their cable slung across my driveway. My nieces in Hendersonville and Asheville are still without power and several towns and I 40 are washed away. If there was a Republican in the White House it would be the leading story.