!lm11
!rm76
The Future of Personal Computers...................Mike Laumer

The days of 8-bit microcomputers are numbered.  First 16-bit, and now 32-bit chips are creeping out of the laboratories.  INTEL, Hewlett-Packard, TI, and Motorola are shrinking the supercomputers down to 1/4-inch square slivers of silicon.

Motorola's 68000 microprocessor chip uses a 16-bit memory and input/output bus, but internally it has a 32-bit architecture.  Texas Instruments has just announced the 99000, an upward-compatible enhancement of the 9900.  The 99000 has new instructions and the fastest clock in the country...18 MHz!

The boys in the labs at Hewlett-Packard are spreading the word about their new 32-bit design.  It multiplies two 16-bit numbers in 1.6 microseconds, and divides a 32-bit number by a 16-bit one in 3.5 microseconds.  That's 12 times faster than the TI 9900!  They are also working on a 528K bit ROM (equivalent to 64K bytes on one chip!) and a 128K RAM.

The INTEL 32-bit micro (iAPX 432) was designed together with the operating system; it supports multiprocessing and multitasking from the ground up.  They claim to be abel to stack them in parallel to boost system throughput and performance up to the level of an IBM 370/158.  It also executes an instruction set which easily supports ADA (a new programming language which is set to be the standard language for the Defense Department).  INTEL already had to expand the ADA language to take advantage of the new architecture.  The operating system itself is also coded in the ADA language.

The home computers of the mid and late 1980's will be very nice indeed!  And maybe we won't even have to wait that long.  Read this little clipping from EETimes:

!rm29
If this is true, it may mean that the Apple IV is less than a year away!

!rm76
Now in production are the INTEL 8086, Motorola 68000, and TI 9900; several more are on the way.  The new micro's will be 2 to 5 times faster than the 8-bit processors, and be able to access up to 1000 times the memory.

The speed advantage of the 16-bit and 32-bit chips is not very large if floating point numbers must still be processed with software subroutines.  Software floating point routines are about 1000 times slower than large-scale computer hardware.  But now INTEL and others are bringing out hardware co-processor chips which implement the floating-point math.  They are 100 times faster than software emulation.

The ability to address significantly more than 64K of memory space brings on the need for memory management techniques.  Some manufacturers will offer memory mapping, memory protection, virtual memory, and segmented memory.  From the standpoint of an application program, it is most useful to have directly accesible memory.  Virtual memory is the second choice.  Memory protection and memory mapping are necessary in a multi-tasking environment, or in a timesharing system.

Great new products are foreseen in memories, too.  You know that the Apple II's memory chips are 16K chips; it takes 8 of them to make 16K bytes, and 32 to make 64K bytes.  Well, there are now 64K memory chips; it would only take 8 of them to get 64K bytes.  Of course, the Apple II would have to modified or redesigned to make use of them.  The Apple III is designed to accept them, I think.

Bubble memories are also available, with 1,000,000 bits per device.  These memories operate like little solid state disk drives, and their best application would be as the "roll in/roll out" device for a virtual memory system.  They are faster than mechanical disk drives: in the time it takes a moving arm disk to begin to read or write the first byte of data, a bubble memory will have already transferred 4K to 16K bytes of data.  Bubble memory technology is still new, so they have a high price.  In 3 or 4 years they will be inexpensive enough to put into personal computers.

I can hardly wait to get my first Apple Umpteenth, with 32-bit architecture, a 50 MHz clock, hardware floating point math (25-digit precision), ten million bytes of bubble memory, one million bytes of RAM, built-in peripherals including a printer, 4 disk drives, and a CRT...and it will probably fit in my pocket!

<<<written circa 1980>>>
