Notices by Nina Kalinina (nina_kali_nina@tech.lgbt)

@thomasfuchs limit the data transmission speed to 100 kbps and increase seek time to some 200 ms, and you'll get a close approximate, I guess?

@thomasfuchs oh, and don't forget to waste maybe 30W per floppy

Here's some more scary things to think about.

Most of the devices that have at least a blinking LED and were manufactured in the last 15-20 years are about to start breaking down. That's because most microcontrollers and FPGAs manufactured since 00s are using memory types that guaranteed to live only for 5-20 years.

In the days long gone, mass-manufactured devices with digital logic tended to use mask ROMs or antifuse ROMs. That made the devices cheap, and the data stored to boot them could last almost forever.

But erasable programmable ROMs, and later Flash, became cheaper and more popular. They have benefits of being (somewhat) re-programmable, unified, easy to use, and so on. The data retention for Flash-based devices (reprogrammable FPGAs and microcontrollers) is ±5 years. Those that use EPROM (pretending to be one-time programmable ROM) can last for 10-20 years.

Alternatives exist, but rare.

How do I sleep now?

@niconiconi people writing C/C++ programs with source files longer than a few screens should be sentenced to porting their code to BSD running on Motorola 68k.

FWIW, this experience helped me to understand why long source files are a bad idea.

But can it run Doom? Well, not yet, but we found UART and got shell. It runs a custom operating system, and nothing about it is googlable. But! the logs show that my guess about the manufacturer and the CPU family is correct, it's ARM by Generalplus running at 96 MHz. It has a bootloader inside; apps are loaded from Nand into RAM