Re: Who cares how open they are ....
You're supposed to use AC for trolling.
Apple could be more open and just as successful - but don’t take it from us. That’s from company co-founder and computing idealist Steve Wozniak. While on a tour of Australia, Woz rekindled memories of the mid-1970s and his dream behind the first Apple computers he built with Steve Jobs. Woz was inspired to speak out after …
This post has been deleted by its author
I love your satire: You know full well that a lot of Internet users don't have the brain power or comprehension skills to not jump to the conclusion that "I like a lot of the openness I see in Facebook or Google, and how things can interplay on the Internet." = "LETS MAKE APPLE AS OPEN AND SECURE AS FACEBOOK" and so you get in there first. Well said.
Steve
This post has been deleted by its author
I think you'll find that such small capacity memory chips were actually SRAM; Static RAM did not need refresh circuitry so was much easier to interface too. It was only later that DRAM started to appear in computers.
Hopefully Woz is correct and Apple stops being a corporate pest.
This post has been deleted by its author
One of the nifty things about the 6502 was its very simple, regular memory interface. This allowed some clever stunts to do, say, video DMA (and incidental refresh) without using so much of the bus that the CPU was starved. So, yes, DRAM. In pretty much all the 6502-based systems. At about one quarter the cost per bit, it was, how you say "a no-brainer".
Yeah, I'm an old enough codger to have designed with 1K through 64K _bit_ DRAMs before I went to the dark side (management, and software)
DRAM usually came as 8 chips (4k x 1, 16k x 1, 64k x 1) had row / column address time multiplexing, needed its tiny capacitors refreshing and 3 different power rails (+5, +12, -5). That is a lot of extra cost: four times as many holes drilled in the PCB for address lines (over one chip SRAM), extra chips for address multiplexing/refresh, complicated power-supply.
SRAM often came in one chip (1k x 8, 2k x 8), one power supply, static.
You seem to be mixing generations in your mind. Back when DRAM was multi-supply and only 4Kx1, contemporary SRAM might also be multi-supply (or slow, we're talking pre-ion-implant days), and only 1K bits, e.g. 256x4. So to get the same number of bits of memory, you needed more chips.
Yes, there were "toy" computers with only 256 bytes of RAM, but seriously, 1K bytes was a minimum practical system (for some definition of "practical", like "able to run Tom Jennings' MicroChess"), and that would have been 8 256x4s or 8 1Kx1's no matter how you sliced it.
If you are going to compare devices without taking time of introduction into account, you might as well ask why IBM was faffing around with "spinning rust" back in the early 1950s when 32Gig flash drives are so cheap.
"Steve Jobs' death could clear way for more open Apple", The Register
"There's a lot of things about the closedness of Apple I don't like and wouldn't have done myself, but obviously I'm very overjoyed with the quality of the products. So is that a result or not? I'm not expert enough to say", Wozniak
"If making it open would give us not the quality of Apple products all working together like they do, I would say keep it closed", Wozniak
http://www.zdnet.com.au/apples-closed-ecosystem-not-all-bad-woz-339337805.htm