drogon wrote:
I know
It's a bit ridiculous, but I really didn't want to go to floppys or my little retro project, much as I love my 40 year old Apple II ones that still work.. So I'm sort of pretending an SD card is a floppy - after all, it's about the same flexibility as a 3.5" disk is...
I know what you're talking about. All that "wasted space".
For a Forth standpoint, a 16 bit Forth that is, 65MB is the peak, since you can only have 65,000 "screens" (which are 1K each).
When I think about 65,000 screens - man, that's a lot. On the other, it's a lot of wasted space (screens are simple, not efficient
).
But the key point, to me, when thinking about this stuff, and off putting to me, was that, yea, using an SD Card as a floppy (or, pretty much anything), is all well and good, but what you (I) really want is the ability to copy data off of the system. For that, you need TWO "floppies".
Yea, I know, lots of work was done with one floppy back in the day, I, too, had a single floppy drive in the dark ages.
But, it sure is nice to NOT have to "swap floppies", especially something as fiddly as a SD Card. (Edit -- can you imagine trying to copy a 8MB section with a 32K RAM buffer? 256 swaps later..."Is that a callous on my thumb? Why is my flash connector loose?")
So, that's where I always stalled out. "Just put in an IDE SD Card". Sure ok, but, then..hey -- how do I make copies. "What a pain!"
Which is why I'm where I am today fixated on USB. One USB connector and a Hub, and "suddenly", I have 4 "floppies" (or whatever, more than one certainly). From here everything collapsed in to the singularity of using the RPI as an I/O controller. Maybe I'll call the project Singularity instead of SuperPI/O.
(Which brings up "If you have network ability, who needs a second drive?". Gah...)