The biggest leap forward in software development for me was the shift to a development station consisting of a keyboard and a CRT (it was a custom unit produced by Intel in the days before the PC was in existance). It seems to me they cost several thousand dollars. As best I recall the first ones I used were large dark blue boxes that included a slot for a 8″ floppy disk. The marvel was that one could make changes to the assembly (mnemonic) code and reassemble without having to repeat all the steps. If the assembler detected errors you could see them at once and it was a much simpler matter to make a fix or two and immediately re-assemble to see if everything was OK. On top of that the magnetic storage was so much easier and quicker than punched tape. Continue reading →

Those of us old folks who got in on the start of embedded controllers can remember when small-room-sized computers started to have competition from Minicomputers. They were built of multiple circuit boards in an enclosure about the size of a large microwave oven and were the first computers to be uksed for more control-related applications.The computing was done with core chipsets that were 4-bits wide (extremely low level of integration by today’s standards, but the available technology drove the applications). If you wanted a 12-bit processor you laid out 3 sets of processor chips (or 4 sets for 16-bit processing) on circuit boards.

About that time Intel and Motorola (and was it Fairchild and RCA?) began to develop more highly integrated ICs that held more of the processor on a single chip, called microprocessors. Continue reading →