David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 4

First Post! Uh, I mean, First CHERIoT Silicon!

We have our first chips back! It is very exciting! Spatial and temporal memory safety, fine-grained compartmentalisation, and also a load of other big chips on a board, so you can play 'Where's ICENI?' on the board picture!

#CHERI #CHERIoT

First CHERIoT Silicon!

Welcome to the CHERIoT Platform, a hardware-software co-design project that provides game-changing security for embedded devices.

CHERIoT Platform
Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 4
When I first saw a 100 MHz Pentium, I thought it was the end of upgrade cycles. What could you possibly do with a 100 MHz CPU in your computer? And now our first microcontroller is 250 MHz. It also has more RAM than my first PC (Amstrad PC1640). Computers are so fast now!
Show threadFrederic ThevenetMar 4
@david_chisnall Damn you had 640KiB of RAM and two floppy drives, right? lucky you! I had an Amstrad PC1512 with, well, only 512 KiB and a single floppy drive...
I don't remember; did the 1640 also have EGA graphics? (the 1512 only had CGA, plus a non standard 16 colours mode, compatible only with a handful of Amstrad applications, whose name eludes me right now).
Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

@fred I actually had one floppy drive and a hard drive! It was the HD20 variant, but the previous owner replaced the hard disk with a 40 MB one. MS DOS back then used FAT12, so had a 32 MiB limit. I had an 8 MiB C: drive for the OS and a few other things and a 32 MiB D: drive for most things (including Windows 3.0!). It did have EGA and two other great Amstrad-only features:

  • A volume control connected to the PC speaker. No idea why other machines didn't have that.
  • An Amstrad (digital) joystick port on the back of the keyboard. The directions and buttons were mapped to key codes, so any game that was playable with configurable keys worked with the joystick.

I think those were both on the 512.

I think both could take a full 1 MiB of base memory and 16 MiB of expanded memory, but I never upgraded mine.

Mar 4 at 3:12pmWeb
Show threadFrederic ThevenetMar 4
@david_chisnall Fancy! :-)
Mine was lacking the built-in joystick port, I think, because we had to buy an 8-bit ISA extension card to plug the joystick.
It was an analog joystick though, so maybe that's why it needed the extra card? Not sure anymore.
Show threadDavid Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)Mar 4
@fred Yup, analogue joysticks required a separate card. Most sound cards had an analogue joystick port. 'PC' joysticks were all analogue, but the PC1640 could also use the same ones as the Amstrad CPC series. A lot of contemporary digital joysticks had Commodore and Amstrad connectors.
Show threadFrederic ThevenetMar 4
@david_chisnall another design quirk from the Amstrad PC series was that the PSU was inside the monitor IIRC, and the central until plugged back into the monitor, hence requiring only a single cord plugged into the wall.