u/Defiant_War90

I revisited the memory map of a system I worked on about 40 years ago and compared it with a modern Raspberry Pi Pico setup.

What surprised me wasn’t how limited it was — but how much architectural thinking already existed back then. Even with relatively small memory sizes, we often prioritized clean separation and simplicity over squeezing every byte.

Looking back, the trade-offs feel surprisingly modern.

https://medium.com/@noborutakahashi/a-40-year-old-memory-map-comparable-to-todays-raspberry-pi-pico-932c4309260d

I recently wrote about an RTOS I built in the late 1980s.

At that time, we had no internet, no libraries — we built almost everything ourselves.

One interesting thing:

we didn’t start with a “bare-metal” mindset.

We began with abstraction during development,

and gradually removed it as we moved closer to the hardware.

“Bare-metal” wasn’t a fixed design — it emerged.

Full article:

https://medium.com/@noborutakahashi/an-era-when-almost-everything-was-my-code-charm-ii-and-bare-metal-systems-0394fb119744