> > Suppose God was made up of an infinite number of the old Z80 computer
> chips
> I still use one of those on a regular basis. Of course, it's in my
> calculator, but hey, that's where I do my best programming anyway.
Well, years ago a friend and I came up with a rough design for a
massively-parallel Z80 machine, but never built it. I forget the details,
but AFAIR there seemed to be some way to connect the chips together such
that you could use 'in' and 'out' instructions for inter-processor
communication without any extra hardware. With 20MHz transputers costing
hundreds of dollars each and 4MHz (6MHz?) Z80s at under five dollars this
looked like an interesting alternative for calculations which could be
split into many simple operations.
I wonder how many Z80s you'd need for a fast DES-cracker? I suspect that
the price/performance would be worse than Pentiums once you include RAM
and boards.
Mark
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